


Leave Her out of This

by Esmethewitch



Series: Quests, Questions, & Mistakes [3]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Alcohol, Aliens Made Them Do It, Angst, Armitage Hux Has Issues, Armitage Hux's Childhood, Asexual Rey (Star Wars), Bad Decisions, Banter, Canon-Typical Creepy Mind Stuff, Canon-Typical Violence, Competent Finn, Crack Treated Seriously, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Drunk sex mention, Enemies to Bad Roommates to Old Married Couple, Ensemble Cast, Espionage, Everyone Has A Backstory, F/M, First Order Politics, Force Bonds: Not Just for Reylo Anymore, Force-Sensitive Rose, Gray Jedi Rey, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Sexual Content, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, Mild Gore, Mind Control, No Smut, Plot, Post-TLJ, Rose & Hux become the mystery-solving duo nobody asked for, Rose Tico Needs A Hug, Snoke Origin Story, Snoke wasn't a creepy old man he was a creepy angsty teen, Tags that contain spoilers will be in chapter summary or notes, The Force is Scary, Worldbuilding, accidental adoption, at least they bicker like one, more slow defrosting in the microwave than slow burn, please read the chapter summary/notes, screwball comedy, some horror, the knights of ren
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2019-08-09 15:57:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 52,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16452914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Esmethewitch/pseuds/Esmethewitch
Summary: It began when Armitage Hux and Rose Tico woke up unhappily married in Canto Bight and asked some serious questions. Like: "How do we get secretly divorced?" or "How drunk did we have to be for this to happen?"Meanwhile, Rey hangs precariously between the Dark and Light Side. The First Order's political gears silently turn in unexpected places. Finn reunites with a family member and starts difficult conversations. Rose and Hux reluctantly confront the demons of their pasts and their current awkward reality. They start investigating the roots of the First Order and The Knights of Ren while caring for Snoke's bratty but scared little sister who knows a bit more than she should. And they have to kill Kylo Ren too.





	1. What Happened Last Night?

“The last thing I remember in detail is you trying to tear off my uniform with your teeth,” said Hux, rubbing at his temples and grimacing. “It had your desired effect for the gloves, was ridiculous for the hat, useless and frightening on the pants, and only ripped a hole in the greatcoat. I’ll have to get it repaired, thank you. I just took everything off after that. You kept biting me though. It was a weird mix of terrifying and hot. You didn’t break the skin much, so I let it go.”  
  
Rose flinched. “I did that? Did we...y’know…” She looked shaken, wincing at the rays of sun intruding through the blinds.  
  
Hux rolled his eyes. “I still can’t find my pants. I’m dying of a hangover and you look like death warmed over. Do you seriously think we played holo-chess and read spiritual literature? There are painkillers and water on the nightstand. I already made some caf, if you want any.” Upon waking up, he had the horrible thought that Rose may not have come to his bed by choice. His go-to mantra for the long nights when he questioned his actions and worried about the state of his soul was:“I’m evil, but at least I’m not a creep like Kylo Ren.” He might not even be able to use that anymore.  
  
But then he found his wounded coat and the memory returned. Thank the stars. He was ashamed that this...incident had taken place. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to sleep with Rose. She was there, she was enthusiastic, and in his inebriated state those factors outweighed her status as Rebel Scum. Adorable, fiery Rebel Scum who knew how to... no, that didn’t bear thinking about. Besides, prior to last night his dry spell was five years long. That would strain anyone’s impulse control. As evidenced by the tear in his clothing, Rose’s inhibitions were similarly lacking.  
  
She popped a couple of painkillers and gulped down the glass of water. “Force, my head hurts something awful. I don’t want to know how much I drank. I remember we went to this place with neon lights after the drinks at the diplomatic event and I think we signed something on a datapad. For some reason I thought it was really funny at the time. Can’t remember why. Did I really ask you to ‘Fux me up, Hux!’ ? Never mind, I did. Repeatedly. Kriff. You were kind of nervous about the whole thing and kept saying something like: “I won’t do you unless we’re…”  
  
“Unless we’re married,” Hux muttered and then turned pastier than usual. He grabbed his datapad, opening the messaging system. His hands shook as he read. “Oh no. Kriff no. This isn’t good.”  
  
“What?” Rose crawled over to his side of the bed and looked over his shoulder. “Certificate of Marriage: Canto Bight Chapel O’Love… Canto Bight Chapel O’Love!?” She checked the message on her own datapad. It was an identical copy of the message on Hux’s .  
“Maybe we got lucky,” Hux said. “Maybe this was one of those places that don’t really marry you. There’s a saying: ‘What Happens in Canto Bight Stays in Canto Bight.’ I hope it’s true.“ He tapped out a few search terms.  
  
“They seem legit,” said Rose, lifting her head up from her own research. “It says here: ‘Valid in all Systems’. They’re on a top-ten list of Secret Marriage Venues, so I guess that’s something. Ranked right below that place on Naboo. Maybe nobody will know, and we can just move on like nothing happened. I’m sure drunk people get accidentally married in there all the time.”  
“It’s sad that there is a top-ten list of Best Secret Marriage Venues,” Hux observed. “It really should be ten Worst Secret Marriage Venues if anybody can find them on the holonet.”  
  
“Ooh, you’re right,” Rose muttered. “We’ve only got one option left. It will involve compromise and discretion…”  
The hotel room seemed to spin, from causes other than the hangover. Was she talking about what he thought she was? That would be the ultimate nightmare for both of them. How stupid was she? Well, Rose almost killed herself by ramming her speeder into the Traitor and prevented the destruction of their cannon, so she could be capable of anything.  
  
“How do we file for divorce without letting anyone know we were ever married?”  
  
Hux breathed a sigh of relief. There was a flutter of activity from her datapad. She frowned. “This is insane!”  
  
“I know, Rose. I don’t like it any more than you do. I’m sorry if I hurt you. I should have been sober enough to get you transport back and arrange some for myself. I was stupid and too drunk. Normally I don’t do this kind of thing, but Ren’s speech about being ‘Torn apart’ and how he hoped the new treaty would usher in a new era of ‘Moderated Darkness, kind of a grey’ sent me to the open bar. Why was there an open bar in the first place?”  
  
“Yeah, I don’t know whose bright idea it was to include an open bar. I think both the Resistance and First Order have too many recovering alcoholics for that to end well. I wasn’t any better. I got drunk and banged you because I wanted to move on. But I didn’t mean what happened last night. I mean how complicated filing for divorce is. It should be the other way around, crazy hard to get married and easy to get divorced. Look, it says here one of us has to have residency on one planet or on a ship in the same system for at least six months in most places. So you or I will have to choose a place and wait.”  
  
“I’m not leaving the Finalizer,” Hux said flatly.  
  
“I’m not leaving the Resistance,” replied Rose. “Our numbers aren’t what they once were thanks to you, and they need me as a flight engineer. I’m starting X-Wing fighter training too since there’s only like ten of them left. Poodoo. I shouldn’t have told you that.” She glanced at the article on a legal advice site. “We need a lawyer for this. If we claim that the marriage occurred while we were both impaired, which it did, we’d have a nice lawsuit. According to this article, it’s illegal everywhere for any ‘lawful registered officiant’ to perform a marriage ceremony where one or both parties are intoxicated. And they shouldn’t have been able to just scan our ID papers and get a digital copy of the marriage license from the local authorities in the space of an hour. With a good lawyer, we could get our marriage invalidated, the place shut down and some credits out of them.”  
  
Hux fumbled under the bed and pulled out his rumpled pants. He put them on. “Aha. Only problem with that plan is it requires us to go to court, which we can’t do. No. I have a better idea.”  
  
Rose glared at him. How had she enjoyed last night at all? “What? Is it blowing up this planet from orbit after killing me? Because that seems like your style.”  
  
Hux frowned. “No. That is not ‘my style.’ The First Order would gain no tactical benefit from the destruction of Canto Bight. Too many of our informants are based here, after all. My plan simply involves going back to this ‘Canto Bight Chapel O’ Love’ and reminding them that they made a mistake. The correct combination of threats and bribery should help them delete any record of us being there.”  
  
“These people might have married us for the blackmail potential alone,” Rose mused. “Nobody knows who I am, but you’re General Hux of the First Order. If they have proof that you staggered in drunk with a Resistance worker and got married, it could damage your reputation. Not that I care about it.”  
  
“True,” Hux replied, “but what do you think will get them more leverage: a marriage certificate that might have existed at one point in time, or being currently married on record? And I don’t think you want to stay married to me.”  
  
Rose nodded. “I don’t. That’s a good point. Do what you see fit there, but please don’t kill anyone.”  
  
“I likely won’t have to. I think the priestess who married us was drunk too. If she were sober enough to recognize me, she probably would have screamed and ran away or at least have ended the ceremony with something more poetic than : ‘Ya li’l lovebirds have fun now! Go make the Galaxy move for each other!’ and winking at me.”  
  
Rose cringed. “Oh no. I’m starting to remember that part.”  
“I wish I didn’t.” Rose looked like she was going to cry. Hadn’t she followed the Traitor FN-2187 around like a little Massif puppy? Ah well, she did say her bad decisions were to facilitate moving on.  
  
He got up and poured her a cup of caf. “Here. This will help.”  
  
She sipped at it. “Ugh. I just don’t want to eat or drink anything right now. I know I should though. Kriff, I feel so disgusting.”  
“Hangovers are like that. You don’t strike me as the type to do much serious drinking.”  
“It’s not from the hangover.”  
“Ah. I am sorry.”  
There was an awkward silence.  
  
Hux broke it. “We all engage in questionable behavior now and then.” he said. “What matters is how the aftermath is handled. It could be worse for us. If we have a plan and execute it well, we can go back to our lives and pretend this never happened.”  
Rose set her cup down on the table. “Well, that’s a...pragmatic way of looking at it.”  
“Thank you. Now I don’t mean to imply anything or pry, but there is no way we used protection. We should probably get STD testing done for some peace of mind. Do you happen to be on a hormonal contraceptive?”  
“No. I need to get some levonorgestrel. Ugh. That should be the first thing I do.” She looked at her datapad again. “Wow, there are pharmacies that deliver by droid. And they will do it for levonorgestrel. I’m starting to like Canto Bight. Yep, the meds should arrive in two hours.”  
“Alright. Please take it. I don’t want children.”  
“Says a man who can’t get pregnant.”  
“Yes. I would be more scared of children than I am now if I could get pregnant.”  
“Why are you scared of them?”  
  
Hux paused. He didn’t talk about this with anyone. Then, Rose shared his bed and didn’t try to stab him in his sleep, so they could assume some level of familiarity. She seemed just as horrified by the events of last night as he was, so she probably wouldn’t tell.  
“I don’t want to end up like my father.”  
Rose grinned. “Don’t want to be a victim of patricide?”  
He turned bright red. “How...how do you know that?”  
  
“It’s common knowledge that you’re responsible for the death of Brendol Hux at this point. I heard you hired Phasma to do it and she made some obscure venomous bug-thing bite him. There was some officer who defected and gave the whole spiel. Your acting was decent and you covered your tracks well enough that our defector thought Phasma was behind it all at first.”  
  
“Oh.” General Hux seemed to deflate a little. _Cardinal. Another traitor. He talks too much. Worst of all, we have no way of silencing him._ “My only regret about that business is that I didn’t kill him myself. But he always detected the poison I put in his tea. Assassination was more of Phasma’s specialty. I could have shot him, but a blaster was too merciful.No, the prospect of being assasinated isn’t what worries me. I can deal with that. I do it already. It’s the fact that my father deserved the slow, painful death he got.I have nightmares about turning into him and seriously screwing up some kid, to the point where he or she needs me to die and is too weak to do it on their own. ”  
  
He was shaking a little. “I have a long list of things I would never do to any hypothetical child of mine, but I don’t know what I should do instead if they act up. I hate those people who say: ’I got hit as a kid and turned out fine.’ Funny how none of them seem to have any children of their own. At any rate they’re lying. They either got the occasional slap when they really deserved it which doesn’t count as _getting hit_ , or they’re in denial.”  
  
Rose was quiet. What did you say to something like that? She reflected on the intelligence briefing given by Cardinal, a former First Order officer. As an engineer, she technically wasn’t invited to the briefing but they told her to stay and fix the glitchy old holoprojector. She was slightly angry to be given a task that could have been done by a droid, but equally amused that her superiors, competent as they may have been at diplomacy and strategy, were incapable of fixing a simple projector. The intelligence from the defector was interesting.  
  
Hux was touchy about his status as a bastard. Apparently the other cadets at the Academy had constantly taunted him about it, and his father did nothing to dissuade them. The former bullies began to mysteriously disappear as he rose to power.  
  
That explained a lot. Not unless we’re married. So they had drunkenly stumbled across the Chapel O’ Love and one of them had said something to the effect of: “ S’a Chapel O’ Love! We c’n go in there n’ get mmari--marryed--married sho you won’t feel guilty/any kid we ackshidentally have won’t be a bashtard.” She hated Brendol Hux more than ever. He was responsible for the rise of the First Order, indoctrinating an otherwise attractive man into a fascist regime after psychologically damaging him, and her accidental marriage. And he was already dead so she couldn’t make him suffer for it.  
“I’m going out,” Hux said. “I’ll sort out the Chapel O’ Love and bring back some food. Any type you want?”  
“I don’t care. Do you want me to come with you? I wouldn’t mind yelling at them.”  
  
“No. We can’t be seen together. Canto Bight is crawling with spies. What time do you have to be back with the Resistance Sc- the Resistance?”  
“I’m technically on leave and we actually don’t go off-planet until tomorrow night, so I have plenty of time. Why don’t I go instead? You’re too recognizable. I’m a nobody. And I think they’re going to be more sympathetic to someone who was accidentally married to General Hux than to General Hux who accidentally married someone, if you know what I mean.”  
“Yes, I do. That suggestion has merit, even though I doubt you have expertise in interrogations and bribery. But it won’t matter unless you make it there. Do you even remember what street that place was on?”  
“It’s half an hour past noon and I have a blaster.” She punched in the name of the wedding chapel in her datapad. ”Now I have walking directions. We’re ten minutes away. I’ll be fine. If the meds come while I’m out, get them. If they allow you to order pills over holonet forms here, I don’t think they’re particular about who picks them up.” She breathed in.  
“Okay. I’ll stay here and order food. Here are some credits; I think that should about cover bribing the Chapel. Before you go, there’s one more thing: your shirt is backwards and inside-out.”  
  
Rose glanced down. “Oh. It is.” After fixing her shirt and splashing water on her face under the cruel bathroom lights, she marched out onto the streets of Canto Bight. She couldn’t cry. Not yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technically, the off-screen drunk hookup could be read as dubcon because they were both intoxicated. Drunk people cannot consent to sex. But Rose & Hux were about equally drunk and mutually interested in sex due to their impaired facilities. Nobody got hurt, but they are both extremely embarrassed.


	2. Entrance to the Chapel O' Love and Terror

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose discovers the Chapel O' Love is not quite how she remembered it the night before, and she is having some serious apprehensions about it .

The Canto Bight Chapel O’ Love was shabby by day, its tacky neon signage flashing weakly over the door. She pulled out her blaster, set it to stun, and took some deep breaths. You can do this, Rose, she told herself. 

The streets were quiet. Canto Bight was a nocturnal city of casinos, so the day didn’t really begin until five. Still, the emptiness was eerie. Winds scoured the alleyways and swept them of plastic bags and paper refuse before abruptly giving up and dropping them. She glanced at the doors. They were glass, but the building was dark inside. What was the priestess like? She remembered an old woman, plump and flushed with drink, hair dyed black and curled. Her features were faintly reminiscent of her own people on Hays Minor, and she reminded Rose of her Great-Aunt Vi. But somehow Rose knew that if the priestess were really a Haysian granny, stormtroopers were the best snipers in the Galaxy. The harmless old lady appearance was to hide a more dangerous truth. How she knew this was a mystery, but her gut rebelled against entering the building alone.

“Trust your instincts, Rosie,” Auntie Vi had told her once after threatening what turned out to be a pair of First Order recruiters with castration by mining jackhammer if they ever set foot on their street again. “If something feels wrong, that’s ‘cos it probably is.” She enveloped the frozen young Rose in a hug, letting the rusty old jackhammer fall to the pavement. “You should’ve covered your ears when I told those Imperial knockoffs what I’d do if they even looked sideways at you or Paige. I said ‘Rose, cover your ears.’ Yes, I’d really do it if they made me.” Despite the First Order’s target practice having turned Hays Minor into something resembling a pockmarked moon these days, as long as Vi Tico lived no First Order personnel dared disturb the peace of Cromir Street. They could have bombed it into oblivion, but no doubt the hapless men sent on their way that afternoon remarked that the awful old baggage probably had a loyal army of descendents and in-laws scattered across the planet who would avenge her death. They were right. She wished she could heed her Auntie’s advice, but now everything felt wrong.

"What did Hux think the priestess looked like? I need to know. I would bet credits that we didn’t see the same thing."

She put her blaster back in the holster and looked at her datapad. The new contact “Dickwiththedick” was most likely Hux. She texted: “this place is creepy. Im not going in alone i dont wanna die here. ” She waited a few minutes, toying with the idea of sprinting all the way back to the Resistance’s fleet, levonorgestrel procuration and marriage annulation be kriffed. Changing her name to become a moisture farmer on Tatooine sounded like an even better option. A homeless man staggered out of an alleyway. Judging by the crazed look in his eyes, he was on Death Sticks.

“Hey you, girl!” Just keep walking, Rose told herself. She glanced at the datapad and turned, taking a few steps forward. I’m not here and I’m not making eye contact.

“ Yes, you. I don’t wanna see you get hurt. Get out of here! This ain’t a good street for nice girls from off-planet somewheres to stand around looking at their datapads.” As he came closer, Rose noticed he was older, with wrinkled skin, white streaks in his scraggly beard and a falling-apart Imperial army jacket. He was the kind of homeless person her Auntie would have tried to help, so long ago. She looked into his eyes.

“Thank you, mister, but I’ve got a blaster and I’m waiting for someone. I think I’ll be fine.”

He spat at the doors. “The kind of person I’d guess you’re waitin’ round here for, you’d be better off not seeing. Go home.”

She shook her head. “You’re right, but I don’t have much of a choice. And my home is a bunch of craters now.”

“Isn’t everybody’s these days. It’s a kriffing shame. Well, I can’t make you, but look after yourself, you hear?”

“I’ll try. Thanks.” He scuttled off, leaving Rose to her thoughts and a swelling sense of dread. Hux still hadn’t texted back. She sent off a new one: “this homeless guy told me to get out of here it’s not safe. Pls respond.”


	3. Mindless Superstition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose's memories are bothering her. It seems that there is some unknown entity bent on controlling herself and Hux.

Hux’s datapad was buzzing with unread notifications, all from someone apparently named “hotrebelscum”. It had to be Rose. The only other filthy Resistance member who remotely deserved that appellation in Hux’s books was Poe Dameron, but he was already in a committed relationship with ex-FN-2187. And just because Hux swung both ways didn’t mean he would forgive those who caused expensive destruction in bombing runs or while swinging a lightsaber.

The messages were poorly punctuated with almost nonexistent grammar. In theory he understood that datapad messages were sent informally, as a substitute for conversation. But every model came with an autocomplete feature--why didn’t people use it? He glared at them. So Rose was scared. Fine. She would sneak aboard the Finalizer in a stolen uniform and fight when she knew she was beaten from the start, but Force forbid her to stand around a street in a sketchy part of Canto Bight for a few minutes. He would never understand the Resistance. He debated sending her a sarcastic message asking if he should call Rose’s parents to pick her up-- on one hand it was cutting and summarized the situation; on the other they were likely dead and mentioning them in such a cavalier way was too insensitive even for him. The pad vibrated again, and the newest message from hotrebelscum read:

“What did the priestess that married us look like this is important pls tell me”

Perhaps she was in the chapel trying to find the one who married them and explain the situation. He liked it when other people were giving the complicated explanations for him. And in a flash an image returned to him: a youngish woman, not more than twenty-five, with a faint Arkanis accent. Her hair was ginger, but with a few incongruous white streaks that bespoke a hard life. He wrote:

“She looked about twenty and was a redhead.” Immediately, Rose’s response read:

“Thats not what she looked like to me, she looked old she sounded like my aunty. We saw differet things, so some kriffed up stuff is happening. Im not going in there. We need to talk about this”.

Hux snorted. The girl was bent over the toilet last night, and now she was insisting that her drunken memory was infallible. “You were drunker than I was,” he tapped.

“Maybe i was, maybe i wasnt. But if you heard the old stories abot the changers and the shifters youd be scared. They can make you do things they say and you get this feeling when your around them and nobody can agree on how they looked after they saw them.”

Hux laughed. So the Resistance was so weak because they subscribed to mindless superstition. They relied on a dying religion and pointless optimism, so perhaps they believed in fairy stories too. The kind Brendol had never let him hear. He would sort out this nonsense at the Chapel himself. To put her mind at ease, he wrote: “Coming over.” And because he didn’t trust her to stay put, he activated the nanotracker he planted in her shirt. Normally the fact that he didn’t have time to turn it right side out again would have worried him, but at least Rose was prepared to accept that she might have treated her clothes poorly while drunk. She certainly abused his. No matter what he did with the finest thread and his smallest needle, the sewn tear in his greatcoat would be forever visible. To him.

If Rose knew about the tracker, she would have called him a creep. However, he had more durable versions of the trackers attached to Unamo, Mitaka, Thannison, his cat Millicent, and Kylo Ren. Not because he wished to harass them, but because he worried incessantly about his cat and his officers running afoul of Ren. His staff knew about the tracker on Kylo, even having his position marked as a red dot on a virtual map of the ship on their datapads. It gave them the chance to run and hide when Bootleg Vader approached.

The tiny device in Rose’s clothing would die the first time she did a load of laundry and didn’t give a more precise location than a ten-foot radius, but it would do. He planted it for two reasons: to give him an excuse should his indiscretion be discovered by a fellow First Order member, and because he didn't trust Rose to not stab him in the back to hide all evidence of her mistake. Her location matched that of the Chapel O’ Love on the map. He picked up his blaster, donned his hat and coat, and went out the door mentally cursing the capricious Resistance and their mindless superstition.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------  
The winds outside the Chapel were picking up again. Rose could almost hear the condescension in Hux’s messages. She didn’t expect him to believe her. At least he was coming. Unbidden, she remembered huddling in a dark basement with her sister Paige while the sirens blared overhead. The girls were home alone, as their Great-Aunt was at work while the alarms sounded.  
They had one dim battery-powered lantern that was supposed to only be for “absolute need” as black-out was deemed effective civilian defense. Rose turned it on. It cast a blue glow over their faces, but did not emit enough light for her to read her Introduction to Mechanical Engineering book.  
“Auntie said we have to leave it off, the Regulations say so,” Paige protested.  
“They never bomb within a block of Cromir street. We’re not close to anything important,” Rose countered. “ I read somewhere that fish that live in cave pools lose their eyes over time. I don’t wanna go blind.”

“They don’t.”

“They DO, it’s in the school Biology textbook. The one I’ll get to check out and read properly next year.” Rose was indignant. She studied harder than Paige, but everybody praised her older sister for her efforts in the Youth Auxiliary of the Resistance and ignored little Rosie who was too young to join. She earned top grades last school term and all that got her was a visit from those greasy First Order recruiters.

“That’s the descendents of the fish with eyes, Rosie. Evolution doesn’t work in one generation. Read the whole thing.”

“I wanted to, but they wouldn’t let me check it out cos I’m only a grade five and they’re on reserve for grade six.”

“Just turn off the kriffing light, Rosie.”

“Don’t call me Rosie. That’s a baby name. I’m TEN!”

“So old. I’m in charge and I’m thirteen.Auntie told me to look after you.”

Rose could not dispute these facts. She countered with the only ammunition she had left. “You said kriffing. Auntie says you’re not supposed to swear.”

Paige sighed. “Are you fighting me because you’re angry, or are you fighting because you’re bored?”

Rose surrendered. “I’m bored. Can you tell me a story?”

“What kind of story?”

“A scary one.” Paige’s eyes narrowed.

“I think you’re frightened already and a scary story would make things worse.” This proved exactly the wrong thing to say.

“I’m not scared. I just like scary stories. Go on. Tell one.” Truly, Rose was scared of their Auntie not coming home or the soldiers that haunted their streets kicking open their front door, stomping down the stairs, and dragging them out. She wanted to hear about how people faced made up monsters so she could fight real ones.

“Very well then. Out in Wild Space, there is a species that nobody knows very much about. In their natural form they are very big, taller than any human could ever be. I’ve heard whispers about their sort when I try to listen in on Resistance meetings. I didn’t make them up myself, they’re real. They say one of them’s gotten involved in the War. The name they call themselves is unknown. But the name everybody else calls them is Changers.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very scary name”, Rose muttered.

“It’s not a name so much as a description. What they do is change things. They can change their faces to look like anything, and imitate any voice you’ve ever heard. Your family, any lover you’ve had, the people next door...they can look and act like people they’ve never met because they can see inside of your head.”  
Rose considered this. “How do they see inside of your head?”

Paige grinned evilly. “I don’t know. Some people say that they are telepaths and never speak among their own kind, only reading each other’s minds. Others say that they use the Force, more powerfully than any Jedi of old could. That it lets them see into anyone’s mind and make their victims think that they are seeing their mother, or their spouse. Not only can they read minds and look like anything, they can amplify or suppress their prey’s emotions. They can’t draw on anything that isn’t there to begin with, but they can turn annoyance to murderous rage, a prick with a pin to unbearable agony, or a little mistake to the most shameful thing you’ve ever done.”

“So powerful,” Rose whispered. “You’re getting better, Paige. Last week you just told me that Ewoks would eat human flesh and that sounded made-up. I almost believe this.”

“I told you I’m not making this up,” said Paige. “Anyway, they have only one weakness: if they are trying to bend two people to their will at once, each person will see and hear something different. More so if their intended victims have opposing desires. So they can be defeated if you fight them in a group, or maybe if you’re a Jedi. I don’t think their weaknesses make them any less frightening though. Because…” Paige paused for dramatic effect, and grabbed the lantern, positioning it under her chin. “One of them could be anywhere. You only have my word for it that I am Paige Tico, your sister. And you are alone…”

Rose shrieked and tackled her, knocking the lantern to the floor. It broke, plunging the room into darkness. They rolled on the floor, trading clumsy slaps.

“I’m Paige, you dummy!” her sister said. “If I really was a big bad Changer, I wouldn’t bother with you. I’d make that smarmy evil Brendol Hux think I was Darth Vader and then I’d kill him.” That sounded like Paige, alright. So she was just getting better at telling horror stories. Rose apologized and sniffled a bit so Paige would wrap her arms around her, guarding her from the real monsters and the dark.

The memory faded out. It was so vivid it could have happened in the last hour, not years ago. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Paige Tico was dead and would never tell scary stories again. She swiped at her eyes with her sleeves.  
The dark glass doors to the Chapel O’ Love burst open.

“Ah, Rose Tico.” Her sister’s voice rang out, familiar but somehow wrong. “We need to have a serious little chat before your boyfriend gets here.” She was lifted bodily into the air and pulled into the building. She screamed, louder than she had at the end of the story at age ten.

Rose’s cry reverberated through the empty streets. The homeless man stopped his scavenging through a bin one alley over to listen to it. Shame, really. She seemed a nice girl. But some people were beyond help. Drunk on rum and courage, he had tried to tell the Lady, the thing behind the doors to go back to where she came from,but he was not strong enough. Instead the Lady took out some part of his mind, broke it, and let him wander as an example. When the Lady had her mind set on one thing or person, it was suicidal to cross her.


	4. Avenging What we Loved

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose gets answers, but not of the kind she expected.

Rose floated about ten feet above the ground, bringing her to eye level with a thing with her sister’s face. The image flickered, sometimes resembling Paige Tico, sometimes slipping into a blurry smear. She was too frightened to scream. This isn’t Paige, she told herself. Paige is dead. The image changed, looking like Auntie Vi again. She’s dead too, and I didn’t believe it was kidney failure. She was always healthy. It was likely poison. She was too much of a threat to the First Order’s control to be left alive. The images shifted again. There was blonde little Janica, her first kiss at age seven. They mashed their lips together in the shelter of a moisture capture station at recess until Rose broke off.

“This feels gross. I don’t know why anyone does this for fun.” Janica wiped the slobber off of her lips and nodded assent.

Fairy tales and holo-films had made kisses seem like so much more than two people drooling on each other. Rose voiced her working theory on why their efforts did not live up to expectations:“I think it’s ‘cause we’re not married. Married people do it all the time and they seem to like it a lot.”

“Rose?”

“Yeah?”

“When we’re grown-up, will you marry me?”

Rose sprinted back to the safety of the class kickball game. She wasn’t ready to think about that yet.

I never really loved Janica as anything more than a friend, she mused. A very good friend, but still. Little kids experiment, that’s all it was.We never talked about the kiss again, but we did everything together. And I hate that you’re taking the shape of her, you fiend. Get out of my memories. She got a blaster shot to the head in the Ionshi Mines Rebellion when we were fifteen. I lived and she didn’t. The image dissipated and changed to her first real lover, a pilot whose X-wing she took a little more care to fix up than strictly necessary. But he too disappeared in a bloom of flame one ill-fated bombing run three years ago.

“STOP!” Rose screamed at whatever this thing was. Maybe it was a Changer from Paige’s story, but it had no control over her for one important reason--everyone who had ever truly reciprocated her love; romantic, familial, or platonic was dead. It had no power over her. And she could feel the thing’s uncertainty and frustration. In a rage, it changed into General Organa, then Poe, then Finn.

“You’re getting desperate,” she hissed. “Quit embarrassing yourself and stay in your true form. Then we can talk about what the ever-loving kriff is going on.”

The after-images of all the forms the thing took burned a bright yellow and coalesced into a new figure. It was about eight feet tall with smooth white skin, no hair, round blue eyes, and was wearing a ruffled red dress and red slippers with little bows on the toes. It was an outfit Rose would have swooned over at age eight. And for the thing’s size, it had a childlike quality to it somehow. The creature had been crying.

“It didn’t work,” it said. The voice sounded feminine. “I gave you what you wanted and you’re still not happy. My brother said that if I rewarded your kind, they’d obey me. He’s never wrong.”

Rose was perplexed. “What are you talking about? What do you think I wanted?”

“That man with the red hair, General Hux. Your husband. I saw that you both had the same pictures in your mind. I asked Mama about the things you were imagining in the pictures, and she said that they were things people did when they were married. But you weren’t getting married on your own, so I helped things along a bit.”

“Helped things along…?”

“You drank too much alcohol, so I could talk to you a bit easier. I’ve always been able to influence you some, but you fight me unless you’re drunk. Or feeling something strong. Like that time with Finn. You were scared for him, so I could tell you to run your speeder into his. I couldn’t have your lot destroying that cannon. Hux I can’t get to unless he’s drunk or going crazy because he hasn’t slept enough. But he hardly ever gets more than four hours of sleep a night so he's open to suggestions most of the time.”

Rose’s mouth fell open. “Do you know how wrong that was?”

“No. Why was it wrong?”

She hesitated. How could she explain the difference between inadvisable lust and love to a being that seemed to have a mental age of eight or so? And why was she in her head? “Look, who are you? I can’t talk to someone without a name.”

“My name is…” the creature didn’t have eyebrows, but the smooth face scrunched up in thought. “Muriel!”, she concluded.

“Well Muriel, do you have a favorite food?”

“Yes, it’s dried Plimki-meat. It’s so chewy!”

“Would you eat it when you weren’t hungry?” Rose tried not to speculate over what a Plimki was. She had gone off meat when she learned that the mystery ingredient in the canteen soup was porg.

“Maybe. But then I’d get a stomach-ache and that hurts.” Good, they were getting somewhere.

“So if somebody put some dried...Plimki-meat in front of you when you weren’t hungry, you would say thank you but you would eat it later.”

“Yes.”

“What if somebody made you think you were hungry so you’d eat it? How would that make you feel?”

The entity called Muriel blinked. “I’d have a stomach-ache. I would be very angry at the person who made me eat it.”

“Now you have some idea about how I am feeling now, Muriel. The...things you saw me imagining could have been things I liked if stuff was different. But the way things were, I didn’t like them. You did a very,very bad thing by making me get married.”

Muriel’s face was blank. Then she began to cry.

“I just wanted you to be happy and now you’re not happy and I can’t really control you anymore because you see through my illusions so I don’t know what to do,” she sobbed.

“Why do you want to control me?” Rose asked. “You could just let me go.”  
“No. I have to have somebody who does what I want. Otherwise I’ll never be able to get revenge.”

“Revenge for what?”

“My brother’s death. The wannabe Sith Lord that killed him is going to die and then I’ll finish what my brother started. I’ll have an empire dedicated to his memory.”


	5. Hidden Forces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose learns more of Muriel's plans for her, and her past is put into context.

Rose tried to move from her position in the air. It was no use. Her limbs felt like they were held in restraints, but at least her body was supported somehow so she didn’t have to worry about death by slow hanging.

“What exactly has your brother started?”

Muriel smiled in between her tears. “Oh, my brother was the smartest, most nicest person. He was already the Supreme Leader of the First Order so he could rule the Galaxy! And he wanted to go beyond that.”

_Her brother was Snoke,_ Rose realized. _But that doesn’t explain what they are or where they came from. She talked about ‘Mama’ and seems to have no real understanding of sex, so she is probably a child._

She frowned and put on her most authoritative voice, the one she used to use on the younger children hiding in the shelters and later on insolent radar technicians. “And what does your Mama think about all of this? Did she approve of your brother’s work?”

Muriel shifted awkwardly from one beribboned foot to the other. “We don’t talk about my brother anymore. Mama and Papa just had a big fight about him after he got murdered. They blocked me out of their minds, so I know it was bad. They only do that when they’re really angry. I don’t like it when they’re angry.”

“Ah. I used to hate it when my Auntie Vi got into arguments with Auntie Carissa. That was her girlfriend. They never got married, but they might as well have been.” _Poor Auntie Carissa. She never got to see Auntie Vi as much as she wanted to and died before she could watch Paige and I grow up. When Carissa was running late and Auntie Vi was worried, she’d pace up and down, clean her blasters, and not tell us anything besides: “Never love a spy, girls. You’ll never sleep well again.”_ Rose blinked. Years ago, she’d tried to forget Carissa, the woman who looked nothing like a holo-drama spy with her gray hair, sturdy frame, and embroidery addiction. She was the person who taught Rose that if she made herself seem like a bubbly little scatterbrain, she could get away with anything short of murder. It was a valuable lesson that she still used today. Rose shivered, remembering the ranks of the Hays Minor “disappeared”. The only thing speculation over their fate did was induce nightmares. Had Rose and Paige stayed and kept fighting, they might have joined their unofficial great-aunt.

“ The fights never lasted too long and weren’t that often, but it hurt to watch two people I loved, who loved each other be unhappy like that. Auntie Vi said that having arguments was part of what made them stronger as a couple. Because when something bothered one of them, they’d talk it out and find a solution. Maybe your parents are doing that now. It’s hard to cope with now, but it will pass.”  
The creature who called herself Muriel picked at a ruffle on her dress with a pair of long white fingers, avoiding Rose’s gaze. “That’s nice. I wouldn’t know. I’ve always wondered what people in love are like. I don’t think Mama ever really loved Papa.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” _So it’s that kind of family. If I can get this...Muriel to trust me, I might have some leverage over her._

“It’s okay. I think they both got married for the gain in power. They got super mad when my brother left home. He said he’d bring them back the best prize of all, another galaxy. Mama said he hadn’t the sense Darth Plagueis gave his first experimental rock.”

So the legends were true, or at least disseminated further across Wild Space than previously thought. “Another galaxy” sounded mysterious too. _Priorities, Rose,_ she told herself. _This Muriel can get into your mind. Ask her how and why. She might let something slip._

“It’s good to finally meet you,” Rose said. “I think I have heard your voice before in dreams, or when I was more drunk than was good for me. I just want to know how and why you got in my head.”

An impish grin spread across Muriel’s face. “I wasn’t supposed to bind to anyone yet when I found you. My brother told me to wait until someone stronger came along. I didn’t listen. You can use the Force, but it’s barely there. You could have gone your whole life not knowing about it. If you practiced, you could use it to lift pebbles maybe, but lifting giant boulders and Force-choking is beyond your abilities.”

“I don’t believe you,” Rose said. “If I could use the Force, things would be different now.” _I wouldn’t be hanging here after sleeping with a wannabe Moff Tarkin, that’s for sure._

“You didn’t listen,” said Muriel petulantly. “Your grasp of the Force is about a tenth as strong as the average Jedi’s, but it is more than what most people have. The strongest proof you have it is that you survived for fifteen years on Hays Minor, raised by a Resistance cell leader and a spy. If you were anybody else, you would have been kidnapped and used as a hostage long ago. Your aunt would have done about anything for you and your sister, though she tried to hide it. Or you would have just died in the crossfire. Remember all those times you had a bad feeling about something? All those blaster shots you dodged? That time when you got your first mining job, but there was an...off feeling about the place and you panicked and activated the emergency klaxon.”

Rose blushed. She was thirteen and terrified. The shadows, the deafening clatter of machinery, her miserable colleagues-- the whole place felt wrong somehow. When she pressed the button, she felt that she had saved everyone, no matter how illogical her action. As they gathered aboveground at the assembly station two blocks over, her boss was screaming at her. Her mind went blank and she looked up at three TIES flying in formation by a dreadnought. That was a normal sight on any given day. They didn’t usually patrol the airspace around this sector though…

“You can’t just hit the button because you’re scared of the dark and you want to go home, you stupid little nerfherder! The emergency button is for EMERGENCIES. You are fired. If your aunt were still alive, she would be so ashamed of you right now…” The ground rumbled and the mine exploded, throwing up gouts of of flame and earth. Her supervisor stopped his tirade and gaped at the destruction. “Those First Order bantha-kriffers could have killed us all”, he whispered. A cacophony erupted around them. Some people cried, others screamed expletives. Rose was strangely calm. Somehow, she knew something like this would happen. But she still needed a source of income for the rent money and a one-way ticket off planet with Paige.

“Sir?” she asked, “Am I still fired?”

Tears pooled in the gruff older man’s eyes. “No, Tico. You’re promoted. I don’t know how you did that, but thank you. I guess you’re this company’s lucky charm.”

Muriel pulled her back into the present time. “Statistically, you’re a dead woman walking. The Force has shown you what you needed to know at the right time, and you learned to trust it. You could influence people a little in your own way as well. You let them think you were innocent and harmless, so they left you alone. Part of that was your training, but some of it was your mind influencing theirs. That’s how you’re still alive right now. I can communicate with you through it, and by extension you trusted me.”

“Not anymore,” said Rose. “I don’t understand what you want from me. I will never have a Jedi’s abilities, so Kylo Ren would kill me in a duel. There’s no way I can control him either.”

The oversized pale hands clapped together. “Oh, I have a much better plan than making you fight Ren. Hux is going to betray him, and you are going to make sure he does it right. It’s only fair. My brother was betrayed by his own servant, so Kylo Ren is going to be killed by his lackey. I can’t wait.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of course Hux has ran into some trouble on the road, but that will be addressed in the next chapter.  
> I will probably not update this for a couple of weeks as I wrote this when I should have been studying for exams and writing a paper.


	6. The Lieutenant's Tale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lieutenant Mitaka reflects on the mystery that is General Hux and their miserable schooldays.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains attempted rape and implied/referenced child abuse. (Also Unamo manages to kinkshame Kylo Ren despite there being no actual sex or appearance of Kylo Ren in this chapter. She is very talented in that way.)  
> Basically, it is a brief summary of Armitage Hux's awful, terrible, no-good childhood and it can be skipped if desired because it is mostly here for characterization . Since we know so much about Rose's home life, I wanted to write a bit about what made Hux what he is today. And because his childhood was awful, it's mostly all in one place. This is probably going to be the darkest chapter in this fic. Mitaka will be a returning POV character, by the way. The next chapter will be MUCH lighter and includes comic relief.

Though young Muriel would control General Hux if she could, such an endeavour is difficult. To control someone like Hux, one would first have to understand him. Completely and fully, not just having a superficial knowledge base of his current motivations and fears. Lieutenant Dopheld Mitaka, as the closest thing Hux ever had to a friend probably had the strongest grasp of the General’s past and psychology, but even he would readily admit there were things he would always wonder about with regard to his CO, things best left that way.

One day, months before the destruction of Starkiller, Mitaka sat in the Officer’s mess on the bridge with his friends Petty Officers Thanisson and Unamo. They choked down the tasteless lunch and sipped at the cold caf. Thanisson incessantly drummed his fingers against the table and Mitaka was internally debating whether to say that this bothered him or not when Technical Supervisor Jones burst into the room.

Jones was prone to fits of rage, but it was understandable given the dregs of the Galaxy she had under her command. And a position in Technical these days was a winning ticket in the lottery of developing an anger management or anxiety problem (depending on the individual) as Kylo Ren destroyed any equipment in his way as a hobby. At least for Jones, she had some relief in the form of Thanisson. Officially, officers and technical agents were not supposed to fraternize, but nobody wanted to explain that to Jones. Mitaka personally thought that rule was stupid because Technical workers were under a separate chain of command, so relationships between the departments ran little risk of developing issues as a result of power imbalances.

So nobody minded when Thanisson shyly presented his beloved with a muffin and Jones gave him a peck on the cheek in return. “Sorry the caf is still cold and gross, everybody. Kylo Ren lightsabered the machine and it’s all I can do to get it to run. We really oughta replace some parts, but General Hux tells me there’s no budget for that. I tell him, ‘I hope you like your caf cold and unreliable ‘cause that’s how it’s gonna be here without those replacements,’ and he says: ‘I only drink tea so I don’t care,’ and sends me on my way.”

Everyone grimaced. The life of a Technician was hard enough with the ugly orange uniform, excessive work, and general lack of respect. But Jones could get away with yelling at Hux. She could get away with yelling at anybody because she kept the ship running. “I wanted to get Matt to help me out with the machine. Boy’s too thick to rewire calcinators, so I figured he could start with the caf dispenser. But I can’t find him anywhere.”

Mitaka frowned. “Jones, you do know that Matt is actually Kylo Ren, right?”

“No way! Really?”

Unamo leaned in. “Let me put it this way: did you ever honestly think that anybody but Kylo Ren would be so obsessed with Kylo Ren?”

“You got a point. That explains why when I told ‘Matt’ that if he loved Kylo Ren’s rock-hard eight pack so much he should go marry him, I passed out.” Jones was an unsurpassed expert on calcinators and the finer points of technical maintenance, but her knowledge of other things was slightly less extensive. “But what do I do now? I can’t fire ‘Matt.’ I’ve tried twenty-three times already. He’s a nerfherder of a radar technician. I don’t get why he does this if he doesn’t have to.”

Unamo sighed at her friend. “Just play along. I think he gets some twisted sort of satisfaction out of being told that he’s a bad little technician who can’t recalibrate anything to save his life and will have to work through his muffin break because he didn’t earn one.”

This sentence didn’t compute at first. When it did Jones’ eyes widened in horror. “Hell to the kriffing no!”

“I didn’t need that image in my head, Unamo,” Mitaka moaned.

“We all get things we don’t need. You’re welcome.”

Jones looked stricken.

“If you tried being nice to him, it might be a turn-off”, Unamo offered.

“Just be grateful he doesn’t force-choke you on a weekly basis and throw you into machinery,” Mitaka said. “The bridge personnel are basically punching bags for him.”

“And if we don’t have to deal with Kylo Ren, Hux is breathing down our necks,” said Thannison. “He made Unamo cry once during a feedback session.”

“I thought we said we wouldn’t mention that again,” said Unamo.

“Well that was the first time I ever saw you cry. I didn’t think you were capable of it.”

Unamo kicked him playfully in the shin. “Stop.”

“Oww…”

“Hux is like that with everyone,” said Mitaka. “It wasn’t personal.”

“So he’s an asshole to everyone,” replied Thannison. “Great.”

“Oh come off it. Hux is alright.” Everyone paused. It wasn’t usual for Mitaka to explicitly disagree with a group opinion.

“You’re starting to sound a bit like Matt,” remarked Jones.

“I do not at all sound like Matt. Hux does not have an eight pack, as far as I know. He’s not shredded.” _Although those few times I did get to see him stripped down to his drawers, he was shredded in the literal sense of the term. He wouldn’t let me take him to the medbay. Said his father would just go back for him there and tell the medics to not give him painkillers. We had to throw away the bedding because he bled on it too much._

“I’m not saying he’s a saint, I’m just saying that he tries, he cares, and he could be worse. That’s all.”

There was silence.

“Didn’t you two go to school together?” Thannison asked.

“Yes. He was a bit different then. So was I .”

“Oh.” Unamo looked concerned. “Were you at the Academy at the time of…”

“Yes, the incidents occurred while we were there. And the structure and culture of the place have changed significantly since we left, thank the Force.”

“I’ve only heard whispers about that stuff from the older cadets,” said Thannison.

“Well Hux was instrumental in ending the worst of it,” Mitaka stated. “I think it’s because he personally suffered the most. His father, all the problem instructors… He knew what they did because it had been done to him first.”

Thannison and Unamo suddenly got very interested in their food.

“What’s this about the Academy?” Jones asked.

“The First Order Officers Academy was not a nice place. No, that’s too much of an understatement. It was a kriffed up hellhole while General Hux and I were there,” Mitaka said. Everybody looked at him. Mitaka never swore. “And that’s all you need to know about it. Hux looked after me and kept me safe from the worst that could have happened. He had a bit of a reputation by then and was four years older than me, so just saying I was under his protection was enough most of the time. I still don’t know why he took me in. I’m not sure what he got from it. Anyway, the good that came out of it is that certain people went missing and nobody bothered to look for them, and most of the school’s policies were rewritten for the better.”

“Sorry you had to go through that,” Jones muttered. “I’ve heard horror stories about the place but I didn’t know how true they were. I’m grateful I stayed in tech now. I can handle Techie and Matt.”

“It’s okay,” said Mitaka. “It was a long time ago.” Of course it wasn’t really. He promptly changed the subject to Unamo’s burgeoning relationship with Captain Phasma, much to her irritation.

Later that night, Mitaka thought back to the things he didn’t tell his friends and likely wouldn’t tell anyone. How he and Hux met, for one thing. He was still ashamed of the circumstances, even though Hux found them amusing. Mitaka was twelve years old, fresh off the transport from his home planet. He got the first prickles of apprehension about continuing his education when Brendol Hux in the ‘Welcome Speech’ stated: “Weakness will not be tolerated here. The inferior among the First Order shall be rooted out and culled.” Someone giggled nervously. Everyone looked at them. It wasn’t a joke.

That sounded ominous. He thought back to the bad teen holo-dramas he watched with his sisters, with plots revolving around boarding schools that put people into arbitrary categories based on nebulous abilities and then dumped their pupils into death-trap ridden mazes. Dopheld laughed when his sisters defended the holey plots and weak characterizations saying: “That would never happen in real life.” Here he was, attending one of those schools in real life. He’d hoped for exactly three hours that Brendol Hux was just a real-life equivalent of the wicked headmaster archetype, and the other adults and children would be the downtrodden but plucky and good-hearted cast trying to thwart him. He was so wrong.

He found the storage closet trying to avoid a third beating that day. His left leg was starting to give out, so he leaned against a wall for a second to rest and catch his breath. Somehow he’d hit a hidden switch and a panel in the wall opened into a dark cavity. Without hesitation, he jumped in and pulled the door shut. And fell against another body. His first instinct was that it was another one of his tormentors. He opened his mouth to scream, but a hand clamped over it.

“Quiet, kiddo. If you’re noisy, you’ll ruin this spot for both of us. If you could get off of me, that would be nice. There’s space to your left, and you can sit down.” Mitaka did as he was told, sitting with crossed legs in the blackness. He could hear a little groan from his new and very temporary room mate as he repositioned himself.

“You must be new here,” the voice whispered.

 _What happened to being quiet?_ “I am. What gave it away?”

“You didn’t check this closet before you jumped in it.”

“Ah.” Mitaka tensed up. Was staying out and trying to fight like a man a better option than this? He reached for the door.

“If you’re trying to leave,” said the voice, “now would be an inopportune time because one of them usually doubles back. If it’s Graskell and his little gang, that is. I think he knows there’s a hiding spot around here, he just isn’t smart enough to find it for himself.”

“Oh.”

“Was it Graskell?”

“Who?”

“Sorry, forgot that your lot doesn’t know anything yet. It’s been a rough couple of weeks. Graskell’s scrawny, light skin, blond hair, face like a wampa took one bite out of it and spat it out. Meaner than a wampa too. Have you met him yet?”

“Yeah.”

“Then we’re staying here. Thirty minutes is usually enough time to lose them. They think I’m too bright to stay in the same place. So I do what they don’t expect.”

“Mhm. Should we be talking right now?”

“It’s probably fine if we keep our voices down. And I want to test out my new system.”

There was a little flare of blue light as his unseen tutor opened a datapad. Now Mitaka could see a face: angular features, red hair. He looked just like---he gulped.

“Wow, they’ve given up for now. Here, take a look at this.” The older boy passed it over.

A map of the academy was displayed on the screen, and six little red dots were moving around on the floor below them.

“So we can leave?”

“Not yet. Wait for it.” And sure enough, one of the dots migrated into a portion of the plans marked “lift”, and back up onto their floor. “Ssh.”

The dot moved towards their hiding spot. Mitaka groped around behind him and found what he hoped was a bottle of bleach or some corrosive cleaning substance. His companion shook his head. “Still.” Mitaka froze.

 _What if he’s working with them? What will they do to me in this closet?_ But the dot quickly moved on, and he could hear the clicks of boots on the floor fading away. Dopheld noticed that the other boy had an arm in a sling and bruises on his face.  
“Got out of medbay this afternoon,” he whispered.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”

“What happened?”

“Fell down the stairs. Broke a couple of ribs besides the arm, banged a bit on the head. I was in there for a week.”

“But there aren’t any stairs on this ship.”

“Smart boy. Too smart. If your medbay admittance form reads: ‘Fall on the stairs,’ then you fell down the stairs.”

They seemed to be approaching some sort of cliff in the conversation. Dopheld was too curious for his own good sometimes.

“How did you fall down the stairs?”

“I made the mistake of starting a literary discussion with my father.”

Wasn’t the whole point of this nightmare separation from one’s parents? That meant his father had to be one of the officers here. And redheads were only so common. It seemed like Young Hux was in a talkative mood, however.

“Have you heard of the novel _A World Apart ?”_  
“No.”

“I just finished reading it and then I saw it on his shelf. I thought we could talk about it. Apparently that’s a thing people do with their parents, they read the same book and discuss it. I hoped we could---well that doesn’t matter. What matters is that my father has no talent for literary analysis.”

“He hasn’t?”

“The point of _A World Apart_ is that it was social commentary published at the height of the Empire. You haven’t read it, but it has a simple plot so I can summarize: this ship of boys going to one of the Academies crashes on an uninhabited planet after getting shot down. The pilot and instructors all died. They try to survive on their own.”

“That sounds like a good book,” said Dopheld. He could imagine the plot now: ripping adventure, friendships that would last a lifetime, intriguing, dangerous non-sentient creatures for the protagonists to fight. He would quite like to read it.

“It’s not. They don’t survive on their own. They go crazy and kill each other. A couple of them are Force users that nobody noticed yet and they turn into little Sith lords with everything but lightsabers. By the time a rescue arrives (a Rebel ship, mind you), they’re nearly all dead.”

“Oh. That sounds sad. Why did you read it?”

“It was an interesting exploration of hubris and the darkness of Human nature. And a major pushback against the Human High Culture movement. See, all the cadets were human. They were the Empire’s finest, high IQs, psychologically stable, good families too, but they defeated themselves in the end and had to be saved by Rebels.”

“What did your father have to say about it?”

“He said it was proof that you couldn’t go slack with discipline. Only the most ham-fisted reading of the work would produce that conclusion. There were older cadets who should have kept order, but they didn’t.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I suggested that the author’s intent may have been slightly more nuanced than that and the historical context of the work was significant, so I ended up in the medbay.”

“Ouch.”

“Correct.” A thin smile appeared on Hux’s face. “It’s mostly my fault for discussing such a controversial book. Something I thought of in medbay was that A World Apart is basically playing out in this school. Only it would be more civilized around here if somebody shot some of the instructors. You didn’t hear that from me, by the way. We have all the problems of the little band from the story besides instructors who keep screaming: ‘Weed out the weak!’”

To Dopheld Mitaka’s eternal shame, he began to cry. “Shh. You can whisper, but crying’s too loud.”

“How can you live here? How does anybody do this? I wanna go home!”

“I’m afraid that unless you can capture a pilot and make him fly you out to some neutral planet, you’re staying here.”

Hux awkwardly put his good arm around the younger boy’s shaking form. “You do the bare minimum. Study hard but don’t look too smart or you’ll be shoved into the refresher toilets until you other people’s homework for them. If you’re lucky. They’ll call you by your family name, your rank too when you get one. What’s your name?”

“D-dopheld. Dopheld Mitaka.”

“Well, put Dopheld to sleep when you have to, and let Cadet Mitaka do the work for you. He’ll serve you well until you can go back to being Dopheld again.”

“Okay. Anything else I should know?” Hux gave Mitaka credit for trying to rally.

“There are certain people you don’t want to get caught alone in a room or corridor with.” Hux rattled off a list of names and descriptions, mostly of senior cadets with a few instructors thrown in. He made Mitaka recite them back. His own father’s name was on the list, Mitaka noted. He shivered.

“That’s everything I can think of for now. Good luck, Mitaka. You’ll need it.” Hux unfolded his lanky frame from the supply closet floor and walked out, leaving Mitaka in the dark.

And that would have been that, had Mitaka not tracked down a holo-copy of _A World Apart_ and read it. He told himself it was a mistake. The gory fight scenes and one particular sequence with a wild bantha gave him nightmares. Later,when he experienced his first real battle, he learned that the fight scenes were positively tame. But he came to a different conclusion than Armitage Hux did upon reading the end, where according to Hux, “the magic good Jedi kid just dies after fighting his Dark Side counterpart, the fight is unrealistic, and then everybody else is totally kriffed.”

The death scene read: “Tomo’s body slowly faded as the sun set over the lagoon, a ripped and stained set of Academy Whites the only reminder of a friend kind and true.” A bit sappy, but what if this was a depiction of the boy becoming one with the Force? Two chapters later, the main character hallucinated Tomo coming back and telling him where to find the ship’s comm in the jungle. The unit is where Ghost-Tomo said it was. And some characters survived. The interpretation Mitaka reached was while people could be horrible to each other, somehow the Force and the Galaxy marched on and hope survived. No wonder Brendol Hux hated the book. It was practically Rebel propaganda. But in a good way (Dopheld thought this last bit, not Cadet Mitaka).

At lunch one day, he finally worked up the nerve to propose this interpretation. Hux sat alone, at the far end of a long table typically occupied by the older cadets.

“Hey Cadet Hux!”

The redhead looked up from his datapad. “Oh, Mitaka. Settling in?”

“Doing fine, thanks for asking. You know the book you told me about?”

“Yes?”

“I think you were both wrong about the meaning.”

“Oh?”

“Remember the scene where Tomo dies?” At this point heads turned to watch their conversation.

“Yes, it was rather maudlin. Especially to have him die in a sunset.”

“I know. But it reads like he became one with the Force.”

“I’m not sure that---”

“Then there was the scene with the ghost and the comm. I think the author meant to do that. He’s practically beating everyone on the head with it. So I think that changes the ending a bit. If you think about it, he really succeeded after all. And Tomo’s friends could see his ghost and it guided them to the comm so maybe they---”

At this point, an instructor cut in. “You! What are you wasting a senior cadet’s time with?”

Mitaka flinched. He knew too much about how the Academy ran by this point.

“A rousing literary discussion, sir.” Hux smiled. “We happened to have read the same book, and had different interpretations of its ending.”

“What book? I should hope it is on the approved list for---”

“Nothing of consequence,” Hux replied. “It’s just a silly adventure story about a bunch of cadets who crash out somewhere in Wild Space. I think Mitaka here is over-analyzing it and seeing symbolism where there was none.”

The instructor moved on. “Yes, that does rather affect the ending,” Hux continued as if the interruption never took place. “But the outcome is still the same. Most of them are dead, the survivors are traumatized, and they’re in Rebel hands. What do they have left?”

“Hope.”

“You sound a bit like a Rebel when you say that, you know.”

Mitaka grinned. He was looking forward to saying this part. “Ah, but that’s the author’s opinion, not mine. And given the time period, it was probably criticism of the Empire.”

Hux looked at him. “You’ll do,” he said. While Dopheld might have glowed in the praise from an older cadet, Cadet Mitaka wondered what Hux intended for him to do. He never completely found out.

The years at the Academy ground by. Hux still “fell down the stairs” on occasion, and Mitaka somehow passed all of his psych evaluations (he found out later that Hux had hacked the system and changed everything). Mitaka took more biology and first aid courses in the hopes of transferring out someday and joining his two sisters at medical school, even though this was a slim possibility. Now and then he used his skills to patch up Hux. No doubt people saw Mitaka flitting in and out of his room at odd hours and assumed they were doing something else. He didn’t care. It meant other people left him alone for the most part, and Hux got to stay out of the medbay. Somehow he kept a sunny outlook on life despite it all.

Coming back late from the library during finals week, his worst nightmare almost came true. A group of cadets who all hated Armitage Hux attacked him. The biggest of his enemies forced him down on his knees.

“So you’re Hux Junior’s little whore,” an older boy sneered. “He never shares anything with the rest of us, so I guess he’ll be sharing you.”

He ran a hand down Mitaka’s cheek. Mitaka snapped. He lunged and bit down on the hand as hard as he could. Twisting free of his captor, he landed punches and kicked at groins. Hux heard the commotion and came running, but by then most of his attackers had ran away. Mitaka expected more of a fight than that. Then he realized it was because everyone thought he would be easy prey. Soft, sweet,quiet little Cadet Mitaka. Who now had teeth and a good right hook, and could fight for himself if his supposed boyfriend wasn’t there to protect him. And when his alleged lover asked him for details on what had happened, if he was alright, he just said: “I want to be alone,” and went back to his room.

Hux was equal parts disturbed and gratified by this incident. At the beginning, he was paralyzed until he saw Dopheld move. He understood that Mitaka became a target because of his association, real and perceived, with himself. He shuddered to think what could have happened. But that night Mitaka proved that he could protect himself without him and Hux wasn’t really needed anymore. He could gradually step back on the avuncular behavior and let Mitaka become his own person. A person who somehow saw the good in a lousy day, secretly composed filthy limericks, and held onto hope despite it officially being a thing for the Resistance. He never let himself think of Dopheld Mitaka as anything beyond a protegé. By then he learned that people that he got emotionally involved with to the point of sex either died at the hands of others or tried to betray him.

And years later, when an overly cheerful girl who released fathiers and believed in hope fought back when he didn’t expect her to, he felt an illogical need to try make things right again, somehow. He tried to suppress it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For some reason I headcanon young Hux in a modern AU as the type of person to have read Lord of the Flies before it was assigned for school and gushed about it to everyone, then watched as his classmates gradually stopped sitting next to him at lunchtime. This was what he planned. (I actually knew someone like that.)


	7. A Little Gossip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mitaka fills Hux in on what he missed while out, and Hux is rude to an elderly homeless person en route to the Chapel. Which is an action universally known to result in bad luck.

Hux was within a block of the Chapel O’Love and Rose Tico according to the tracker function on his datapad when his personal commlink buzzed. It was Mitaka. He didn’t want to talk, but he recognized that in the events of last night he neglected his troops. He knew that Mitaka was more than capable of stepping up to in his absence, but the quieter man was often insecure. He picked up. “Mitaka? I’m sorry, but I’m kind of in the middle of something right now. I don’t estimate that it will take longer than an hour. Can you call back?”

“Oh you’ll want to hear this, sir. You missed a real show last night.”

He could walk and talk. This was fine. “What happened?”

“There’s good news and bad news, sir.”

“Let’s hear the bad news first.” _Did someone spy us leaving the reception together? Oh no…_

“The bad news is that I have barricaded myself in your quarters and Kylo Ren is on a rampage. I slipped off the bridge on the pretense of feeding your cat. I activated all of the traps and alarms, and I’m sitting in your chair with a blaster and Millicent in my lap. If worst comes to worst, I can shove her in Kylo’s face to trigger his allergies and then shoot at him while he sneezes.”

Hux would have upbraided Mitaka for cowardice, but Mitaka’s last run-in with Darth Tantrum resulted in a severe spinal injury, esophageal damage, and a month in medbay. He couldn’t blame him. The potential use of an innocent, angelic ginger ball of fluff as a weapon disturbed him though. “Mitaka, if it comes to it you must protect Millicent first. She never chose to join the First Order. She is not something you throw in somebody’s face. Besides, you’re her Uncle Dophie. Don’t betray your niece like that.”

“Sorry, sir. Sorry, Millicent.” There was a faint meow from the other end.

“But you said there was good news.”

“Yes. Rey was incredible last night!”

Hux’s jaw dropped. He didn’t feel quite so bad about sleeping with a Resistance mechanical engineer anymore. Lucky Mitaka. If he had to guess, the man remained a virgin well into his twenties. He never could get a read on his sexuality either. There were no identifiable tells and Hux never asked. ”Well congratulations, I suppose. Since Ren can read minds, I’m afraid the only thing for it is suicide or running away to Wild Space. Or defecting and asking the girl to protect you as a last resort. Since I’m out, I can probably acquire a berth on a long-haul freighter for you, but you’ll have to run.”

“I’m sorry, I have no idea what you meant by any of that sir.”

“Well, you slept with Rey of Jakku, the girl Kylo Ren has been obsessed with for months.”

“No I didn’t! Hu-sir, why is your mind always in the gutter? What I meant by incredible is that she Force-choked Kylo Ren and threw him around a little. He got mad when he regained consciousness, but General Organa went over to him and gave him a lecture about gentlemanly behavior and how she expected better from her son. She said he deserved it.”

“Why did he deserve it?”

“I didn’t see what happened before she flipped him up into the air, but Unamo said he was being a creep. She applauded, by the way. I know that normally, sir, the expression of pro-Resistance sentiments in an officer are grounds for removal from command and reconditioning at least, but in this case I support her.”

“Ah. I regret missing it. It’s probably for the best though. He would have been liable to use me as a punching bag afterwards.”

“I agree. And if you’re not around, he goes for me.”

“I’m sorry.” The more he thought about it, Hux realized that very little had changed about their fundamental roles since graduation from the Academy. Hux was still the human stress ball for an unstable, overpowered tyrant, and Mitaka stayed as his fragile second-in-command and caretaker. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

“It’s okay. You know, we should really consider asking Rey if she’ll take an assassination contract on Kylo.”

“I don’t think she would. She’d probably get all self-righteous and go on about restoring justice and hope. Because she knows that we’d be more efficient without him.”

“Yes, that is a likely outcome. It was a nice thought though. If you don’t mind me asking, sir, where were you last night?”

“Enjoying my first leave in seven years, Mitaka. It did generate a bit of a mess to clean up though. I’m on my way to do that now.”

“I see. Is it anything like the Rodian splice Incident?”

“No. Nothing like the Rodian splice Incident. Why are you bringing that up again? I was seventeen. I don’t mention the Plimsoll Incident whenever you make a minor lapse in judgement, Mitaka.”

“Just wanted to know if you needed help.”

“Thank you, but I can handle this on my own. Now if you don’t mind I really need to go. Good luck.” He ended the call. By this point he was in front of the Chapel O’ Love. Funny. He didn’t remember this district being a wasteland of urban blight. Breezes blew through the streets, chilling him through the rip in his greatcoat. He thought Rose would be in front of the chapel, but it was deserted. He looked at the tracking application. Aha. So she found some courage after all and entered the building. Maybe she could handle this. He sent out a message:

“Here if you need me to do anything. Glad you’ve stopped letting feelings get the better of you. Have you got our marriage struck off the register yet?”

He waited exactly three minutes. There was no response. So she didn’t need him. Hux could leave. He started walking away.

An obviously homeless man with a beard emerged from an alley, wearing the remains of an Imperial army jacket and a scowl on his grimy face.

“You there! Boy!”

Hux gave him the dead-eyed stare he practiced for occasions such as this one. “You are addressing a General of the First Order.”

The hobo cackled. “You’re not a patch on the real thing, kiddo. I know good Imperials when I see them and they’re all dead these days. But that ain’t the point. I’d bet any credits I had to my name that you got the girl into trouble, and if you have any honor in ya you’ll just have to get her out of it.”

“What do you mean by this insolence?”

“The girl. Dark hair, curvy, nice smile. Polite, unlike some people. I’d think a classy girl like her would have better taste, but sometimes things just happen. The Lady took her while she was waiting for you, I reckon.”

“The Lady?”

“Thing that lives in the old Chapel. ‘Least I think she’s a lady. Hard to tell sometimes, with her kind. She’ll kriff with yer head and you don’t kriff with her. But if you ask nicely she might let your friend go in one piece.”

Hux drew his blaster. “And how do I know you haven’t arranged all this for my professional disgrace? Or overpowered my so-called ‘friend’ and given her to this Lady yourself?” _The Lady sounds like she might be an unscrupulous madam of some kind,_ he thought. _Rose is pretty. She wandered around a seedy part of town on her own, in an unfamiliar city. Bad things can happen that way. Even though she’s Resistance, she doesn’t deserve that._

The old hobo laughed again. He was missing his front teeth. “That’s what you need to do in front of the Lady. She likes to watch a bit of heroics sometimes.”

Hux had enough of this cryptic old man. He was probably off of his head on Spice or Death Sticks. Weapon out, he marched up to the doors of the Chapel O’ Love and pulled them open. He stepped in. And stared up at Rose, suspended by some unseen force in the air and---was that Snoke?


	8. Incapacitated

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Muriel shows Hux who's boss. Rose & Hux get some one-on-one time again to chat. They address That Deleted Scene. The awkward is strong with these two.

“Took you long enough to get here”, Rose said. “This here is Muriel, and she’s Snoke’s little sister. She wants revenge for her brother’s death.”

“I’m not little,” Muriel whined. “I’m bigger than both of you.” She screwed up her face in thought as if trying to remember what she was supposed to do next. Her little-girl tone vanished and to Hux it sounded as if she were trying to imitate her older brother. “Rose is mine. I’ve been in her head for years. I knew what she was ever since she was ten years old and I finally managed to get in when she was thirteen.” She looked down at Hux. “And you’re married to her, so you’re mine too. Rose says I shouldn’t have made you do two do that. But I only want you to do my bidding and live happily ever after.”

Hux glared at Snokette. That sounded more convincing than “Muriel”. No doubt she had given Rose a made-up name. He wasn’t even sure “Snoke” was Snoke’s real name. “Rose was right. We are incompatible in every sense of the term. Do you know what ‘incompatible’ means, child?” He was pushing his luck, he knew. This was a way to test the creature’s maturity and temperament. Unfortunately for him, the thing had taken too many lessons from her brother. Hux felt his throat constrict as an unseen hand pressed around his neck. He made that awful squeaky gasp unbecoming to an officer, and fell on his knees.

“Yes. Do you know what ‘condescending’ means, rabid cur?”

Spots clouded his vision and the edges of everything got brighter. He crumpled to the floor. Did Muriel know that if she held this too long, he would die? He didn’t want to find out. Muriel struck him as the type of child to pick up a pet fish with her hand, take it to see the flowers outside, and giggle about how it was “dancing”, crying when the fish lay still and cold and danced no more.

“Stop!” _Rose? I didn’t think you cared._  
“Why should I?”

“If you don’t let him start breathing again he will get hurt.”

The pressure on his windpipe abated. “Yes!”, Muriel crowed. “I knew it!”

“Knew what?”

“You care about Hux. You might even loove him! He’s your bee-oh.”

“It’s pronounced ‘beau’ and nobody says that anymore. And no, I don’t care about him. He is evil.”

“But you think he’s pretty and you didn’t want me to kill him.”

Rose sighed. “Muriel, you have a lot to learn. You can think somebody is handsome or pretty on the outside, but not like the kind of person they are on the inside. Not wanting somebody to die isn’t the same as wishing the best for them. It’s possible to like someone as a person even if you don’t think they’re pretty. And love, well, that’s rare. There are different types of it…”

Muriel waved a hand. “Quiet, Mama’s saying something.” She listened attentively, as if hearing a transmission from a commlink, and then said something over her shoulder in a language that neither Rose nor Hux recognized. “I have to go. I’ll be right back. I need to give Hux and you instructions, so don’t go anywhere.”

She disappeared. And Rose fell about ten feet from her position in the air to the floor. There was a sickening crunch as she landed. At least she fell feet-first, her head not hitting the scuzzy linoleum until the end. Hux knew from experience that even relatively short falls could cause major damage. His stomach clenched up as he remembered the men and women under his command who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time (wherever Kylo Ren was while he was having a tantrum) and paid with their lives. And of course he practically had a separate set of quarters in medbay.

He rushed over to her. She moaned. That was a good sign. Rose moved her arms. Even better. Some people were just lucky. He held up two fingers.

“Rose, can you hear me!? How many fingers am I holding up?”

She blinked. “You don’t have to shout. And you’re holding up two fingers.” She rolled herself onto her stomach and gasped. Gingerly, she moved a leg.

“I wouldn’t do that. Anything could have happened to your ribs.”

“Thanks for your advice, medic,” Rose grunted.

“How does it feel?”

“Kriffing horrible.”

“If you’re trying to walk, I can tell you right now that it’s a lost cause. By the sound of it, you fractured both your ankles at least.”

“At least? Have I got any extra ankles to break that I don’t know about?”

Hux smiled. She’d live. And this performance after being lifted with the Force and dropped was impressive. “Look, I think I should turn you on your back and check them. At the angle you fell, you’re probably bleeding.”

“Good plan.” She let him gently roll her on her back again and he removed her boots and socks. He sucked in a breath.

“Yes, there is the blood. Sometimes it looks worse than it is, but I’m going to try to stop the flow. Try not to bleed out while I get something to put over it.”

He took off his greatcoat and dug his fingers into the tear. It would never be the same again, so he might as well use it for bandages. And despite their temporary truce, he wasn’t going to give Rose the satisfaction of seeing him shirtless again.

He abandoned this idea after about five minutes of fruitless ripping. The girl must sharpen her teeth, he thought. Kriff. So he would have to take off his shirt and ruin it for bandages like some hero in an insipid holo-drama. The type he vehemently denied watching. Ever. View this blank Holonet-Flix watch history as evidence. And on the off-chance that anyone overheard crying coming from the direction of his room during a sad scene in a holo-drama he was coerced into turning on, it was definitely Mitaka. That boy was soft and a sucker for star-crossed love triangles. At least unlike the holo-drama heroes, Hux had a mostly-serviceable greatcoat that he could put on over himself. _Best make it quick._ He turned away from her and peeled off his dress uniform shirt, ripping it in two. Like everything he owned, it was black. The blood wouldn’t show up. Oh well. He was good at judging levels of blood loss based only on skin tone and response to verbal and physical stimuli now.

“At least part of my teenage fantasy came true,” Rose giggled, and then stopped abruptly with a little cry of pain. _Ribs. At least she’s alert and talking. More alert than I’d like. She didn’t comment on the scars. Well done. Oh no, I’m blushing. I’m not really attracted to her. She’s annoying._

He buttoned up his greatcoat and went over to her. He sat down by her feet and wrapped the halves of the hapless shirt around her bleeding ankles, lifting them into his lap and lightly pressing down. Rose gritted her teeth and flinched. _No bone poking through. Good._

“Only part of it?”

“Yeah. Stupid fourteen-year-old me thought I would get a more aesthetically pleasing injury. Like a blaster wound in my arm. So I could still walk and maybe show off a little more while getting treatment. Maybe even cling to my imaginary hunk with my other arm as he helped me to safety, look up into his eyes and then…”

Hux coughed. “Well, you got both ankles broken, probably a broken rib or two, major bruising, and a decent chance of a mild concussion from the way you’re talking now. I’m no medic, but I’ve seen a lot. The holo-drama writers tend to underestimate the effects of falls or blunt-force trauma.”

“Reality never matches up. And my younger, hormone-crazed self figured if I were the heroine of some sugary holo-drama, I’d get a hero. Not somebody who turned Hays Minor into a bunch of craters killing most of my friends, family, and acquaintances. Not someone who blew up the whole Hosnian System. Or tried to have me executed. Leaving me and having some stupid melodramatic misunderstanding for the sake of tension yes, trying to kill me and my friends, no.”

Hux stared at the chapel’s altar. He hadn’t yet had a chance to properly look at the building’s architecture and estimate its date and probable cause of abandonment. Here he was, not feeling guilty or awkward at all. Why was he tending to this Rebel Scum’s wounds again? Well, she seemed to have an understanding with Muriel and possible new information on the origins of the enigmatic Snoke. One way or another she’d tell him. Building some sort of false camaraderie with a source of information was actually more effective than torture, but regrettably not always possible. He had to be careful with the way this went though. If Ren heard of it, he would be known forever as “Honeypot Hux” or some similarly dreadful and permanent appellation. He would die of shame if that happened. He prided himself on having stabbed his way to the top, not slept his way there. Maybe Rose would stop talking soon. That would be nice.

“On the subject of awful and overdone things in holo-dramas that need to die and happen differently in real life,” Rose went on, “when I was on my knees and you...you put your hand on my face where it wasn’t invited and called me vermin, I thought I knew what you might say next and I didn’t like it. I wasted the few spare hours I had in my youth watching low quality holo-dramas you see. And I grew up on Hays Minor. I know how these things go.”

Hux’s finger throbbed with the memory of that day. Even under the most refined of tortures he would not admit that was when this thing started...not attraction, not a reaction to the first time in years anyone touched him with their actual body...it was curiosity. Yes. That was when the curiosity began and nobody would have to know. “What did you think I’d say?”

“ ‘Have her bathed and brought to my quarters’ or something similarly cliched and creepy. And then...well, either stuff would happen that didn’t get shown on-screen and never got properly addressed, or I’d get lucky and strangle you in your bed or something. I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

“Oh.”

“The first option, not the strangling. Have you got anything to say for yourself, General?” Her voice was surprisingly level for such a topic.

“The goal was humiliation and demoralization. In public. Nothing more.”

“I see.”

“And yet last night happened.” They avoided each other’s gazes.

“It did. That was the night booze, Muriel’s meddling,and my dry spell got the better of me. The best man I know is openly and obviously gay and the woman I had a crush on wasn’t lesbian or bi.”

Hux chuckled. “You fell for a gay man and a straight woman and didn’t get any. That sounds like the punchline of the ultimate bisexual joke.”

“It’s not funny. It’s why I’m single.”

“Technically we’re married now.”

“Getting divorced soon though, don’t get cocky. And the woman wasn’t straight. She was ace.” Rose winced at the embarrassing memories and the pain in her ankles and feet. Why was she confiding so much in General Hux? Did Muriel do some permanent damage to her brain last night? Hux took the pieces of stricken shirt off her ankles and rummaged in one of the pockets of his greatcoat and pulled out a tube of something.

“The bleeding has pretty much stopped. And I found this. Normally I go through one of these by the end of the day but it’s here and it’s mostly full.”

“What is it?” It hurt to lift her head up so she couldn’t identify the product. She was flat on her back staring up at the ceiling which had some rather lurid paintings on it.

“Bacta gel. It won’t set the fractures, but it can help with the pain and prevent infection.”

Rose was aghast.“Do you normally go through one tube of bacta gel by the end of the day? What do you do, eat it? Smear it on your face for acne control and moisturizer?”

“No, it’s for workplace injuries. Do you want me to put it on you or not?”

She went quiet for a while. “Will it cost me anything?”

She didn’t trust him. That was a given. At least he felt disappointed instead of angry because he knew his intentions were impure. And obviously people got hung up on things like shelling one’s homeworld into the stone age.

“It won’t cost you anything. This mess is approximately fifty percent my fault, so it’s only right that I try to help both of us get out of it.” Stars, that sounded fake.

“Okay. Put it on.” Bacta was bacta.

He squeezed it on a couple of fingers and daubed it on her wounds. Ideally he would have sterile gloves for this sort of thing. To her credit, she stayed quiet and still as he touched areas that were surely sore. Or maybe they were just going numb. He let his hand rest on her ankles and feet, checking their temperature against her forehead. They weren’t cold. Good. If they went cold, Rose would be in trouble later. “Can you feel your ankles and feet, Rose?”

“Yes. They’re still broken and still hurt.”

“Let me know if they go numb.”

“I will. Why aren’t we getting the kriff out of here?”

Hux tensed up. “Tell me, have you ever disobeyed a direct order from Muriel before?”

“No. I didn’t even know her as Muriel until today. I thought she was poor impulse control or sleep deprivation at first. But she’s not. She messed with my perception and went through my memories.”

“You probably shouldn’t start now. Not when you’re injured already. She seems to take after her brother.”

“She told me she wanted to finish what Snoke started.”

Hux rolled his eyes. “We should introduce her to Kylo. I think they would get along well.”

“Not they wouldn’t. I told you she wanted revenge for her brother’s death. She knows Kylo did it and she wants him dead.”

“I wasn’t sure if she meant revenge on the Scavenger Rey or Kylo Ren at first. But that is useful. I want Kylo dead too. If she knows how to weaken a Force-user, I’m willing to work with her for now. If she’s not as strong as her brother yet, someone like Rey could be induced to fight her and win.”

Rose sighed. “She’s just a child, Hux. A misguided, overpowered child, but she doesn’t understand what she’s doing. I don’t like what she made us do, but with good influence from someone older she could change.” She didn’t like Muriel, but she reminded her of a younger cousin of hers. In an odd way, she felt some sort of responsibility for her.

“People once said the same of Kylo Ren. He’s an angsty teenager who never grew up, never will.”

Rose bit her lip. Force, everything hurt. The bacta was starting to kick in on her ankles though. She had experienced worse when she crashed her speeder into Finn’s at the battle of Crait, but at least she blacked out when the pain got too much to bear. _As awful as it seems, the Resistance can’t afford Kylo Ren’s death right now. He costs the First Order untold credits in damage to equipment and ruins morale. If he were to die, Hux would take control and an efficient First Order would be harder to fight. Military regimes never last long without an internal collapse though. But in the short run it would be a disaster. I’m not going to tell Hux what Muriel can and can’t do to his mind. Right now, Muriel is my only protection against Hux. Unreliable protection, but better than nothing._

“I think our focus should be on finding out what Muriel is and if the rest of her kind support her plans,” she said. “We literally know nothing about what's going on in Wild Space. I think she's based there. If Muriel’s parents don’t support their daughter turning into a Dark Lord of the Galaxy, that could make things easier for us. Besides, do you want to slave away for someone who takes their inspiration from Snoke? And has the maturity of Kylo Ren?”

“It is not an ideal option,” he admitted. “But what about you, Rose Tico? Muriel said she ‘knew what you were’ from the time you were ten years old. What happened then? What are you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know Rose should not be so chipper after what just happened to her, but keep in mind that this is fanfiction of a franchise that includes mystical powers, laser swords, and "jumps to hyperspace". It's not too much of a stretch to give normal people a very high pain tolerance and ability to banter under fire considering this, IMO.


	9. Shades of Hays Minor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Great General Hux Guilt-Tripping continues. It's unknown if it's having any effect though. And we learn how Muriel found Rose.

Rose looked up at him. “A person. An engineer for the Resistance. A woman. Paige Tico’s sister. Vi Tico’s great-niece. Daughter of Mansil and Petrona Tico, not that I ever got to know them. Citizen of Hays Minor. That’s all.”

“That doesn’t answer my question. What happened when you were ten?”

She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing how it affected her. She remembered how cold she was. How Paige was crying and shaking like mad. The soft weight of a blanket around her shoulders, Auntie Vi gently running her gnarled fingers through her hair and telling her she’d pull through, that she was strong and brave. The way everything was brighter and louder. The feeling of loss at being dragged out of the Forest. Paige said later that she kicked and screamed when she tried to take her away at first, then went limp in her arms. She had to carry her back. The arrival of the doctor, who took one look into her eyes and backed away. Darkness, numb body. Cold. After the fact, they told Rose her body was shutting itself down. Two weeks locked in a dark room, fed through a tube. They’d told her not to talk, cry, or move. She only got to see Paige and Vi once a day, and the arrival of the nurse didn’t register anymore.

The darkness was welcome because it didn’t hurt her like the daylight did, but whenever she closed her eyes when she saw the images. Auntie Vi’s funeral. Flames, explosions. TIE fighters swooping overhead. A parade of more corpses, including Janica and Paige. A bald little girl in flowing black robes who ran up to her and shrieked: “Let’s be friends!” Somehow this one disturbed her more than the corpses.

But there were other pictures too-- a girl with a blue lightsaber, strange four-legged creatures that could run like the wind dashing through long grass, constellations stretching out into infinity. Fixing broken things on a ship. A baby in her arms. These visions she didn’t mind so much.

One day they brought in a priest who said a blessing over her and Paige, and hooked matching pendants of Haysian Smelt around their necks. This gesture didn’t mean quite what it used to anymore, but it was Tradition.

Rose cried at this step, because she knew what would have happened after this perhaps two thousand years ago. “Patience, child,” the priest said. “Maybe they did call you, but you’ll have to wait. We all do.”

Fittingly, the hospital released her the day after the priest’s visit. It was a rainy day. Paige treated her like she were made of glass and ran out to do ‘errands’. Auntie Vi sat her down in the kitchen. “It’s better not to think about what happened,” she told Rose. “Focus on the things you saw and they will pin you down. There are multiple ways to interpret one vision. I wish someone had told me that when I was your age. I wish I asked different questions when I went there too.”

“You went there?” Rose was surprised. Auntie Vi didn’t seem like the type to run off into the dark and ask the Souls about her future.

“Yes, I did,” she replied. “I got answers, but I didn’t have such a strong reaction as you did. And I wasn’t reckless enough to do it at night. I did it at noon.”

“Oh. What did you ask the Souls?”

Aunty Vi smiled grimly. “I asked them who I would kill. I was thirteen and angry. I knew I would become a soldier. That was something I wanted to know then.”

Rose glanced at her wise, kind Auntie. She knew that she had joined a regiment at fifteen, stayed until she got married. She decided not to ask her what the Souls had said.

“Keep your mouth shut about what you saw, don’t make rash decisions based on feelings and you’ll be fine.” Her great-aunt hugged her and made tea. She even got out the little tart biscuits they saved for special occasions. They sat at the rickety old table with the rain drumming on the windows in silence, Rose appreciating the warm cup in her hand, the sounds of rain and the bittersweet taste of the biscuits. And the presence of someone who had gone through a similar thing before.

Hux was looking at her. She could fake a medical crisis, but he seemed like he had plenty of experience in discerning real medical problems from fakes. She couldn’t run away. Couldn’t even bite him this time. So she hurt him in the one way she still could. “I’ll tell you if you tell me how you got those scars on your back.” She had a good idea and didn’t want to know, but she wouldn’t give up this part of herself without a fight.

His face was stony. “My father whipped me. Your turn.”

“It will be a long story.”

“We’ve got lots of time.”

“Have you heard of the Forest of Souls?”

“No.”

“You helped bomb it, I think.” She glared.

“I’ve bombed a lot of things,” he said.

“I went there with my sister when I was ten. We weren’t allowed to go there. The opportunity came when Auntie Vi took us for a ‘vacation’ in the forest district. Of course, she was meeting with an informant. There was less surveillance in the backcountry than in the city. It still felt like a vacation though. Paige and I were city girls, so everything was new to us there. The tall Otorini cedar trees were incredible. They live for thousands of years and have soft green bark. Well, lived. There aren’t any of them around anymore. We freaked out when we heard the nightcrows scream. They were black birds, but nocturnal scavengers and pack hunters. The beaks were serrated, and their eyes looked like huge dark pits. To catch their prey, they would imitate the calls of the species they were after. Thankfully, they weren’t known to imitate humans. We saw a flock them flying out to hunt when we arrived at the cottage we were renting for a week. They’re extinct too. At night, we could see the green glow of bioluminescent bacteria in the mists. They would be dormant while in the atmosphere, and on the surface of Hays Minor they ate and divided. Golden Featherbugs would fly into the mists, trapping the bacteria in the hairs on their legs, removing them with a proboscis later... ”

Hux stopped her. “I don’t want to hear about your fond memories of the beauty of nature on your holiday,” he said. “Just tell me why Muriel is interested in you.”

“It won’t make any sense without context,” Rose said. “To understand what happened, you have to understand the place. Which isn’t around anymore, so I have to tell you about it.”

“If this is an effort to make me feel guilty about my part in subduing Hays Minor, I can tell you it isn’t working.” He gave her a cold stare.

“It’s not,” Rose said. “After the Hosnian System went, I figured you didn’t feel guilt anymore. Sometimes I wished that the First Order did that to Hays Minor instead of starving us out as our planet slowly died. But that doesn’t matter. On with the story.” She took a deep breath.

“The thing about the Forest of Souls was that it had more than normal trees; it had Soul-Trees. Those were Otorini cedars with souls inside of them.”

Hux sneered. “Now you’ll be telling me that everything has a spirit, and the First Order not only murdered countless civilians but innocent trees and rocks as well.”

“No, that is not what I was going to tell you. Do you want me to continue with this story or not?” Her gaze dripped with venom.

“Continue.”

“Very well then. But no more ignorant interruptions. We never worshipped the trees. They were just a means for people’s souls to live on. First, the people had to choose which souls should live for thousands of years to advise and protect any who chose to come their way. Those chosen were usually exceptionally brave warriors, wise scholars and leaders, or the most pious of priests. Sometimes a child would be chosen as well, but that was rare. While the soul to live on was selected by a council, the person they decided on had to consent to it after being tested by the Forest. Otherwise the Soul-Tree would die because it was a prison for a soul, not a home. There is some debate in historical circles on whether people could really consent to being put in a Soul-Tree because to turn down such an honorable offer was a disgrace.”

Hux looked like he wanted to say something, but wisely stayed quiet.

“Then, when the time was right and the trees produced seeds, the chosen soul, their family, and the political and religious elite would walk into the Forest of Souls, stopping at a spot where a new tree could grow. They had to mind how they went. It was forbidden to wear shoes, feet had to be bare. No metal of any kind was allowed. This was because it was a ceremony of giving back to the land we took so much from. Even today nobody brings metal into the Forest. Brought metal into the Forest, sorry. A tourist from Kukiri (one of the countries to the South, not that you’d know or care) went in with hiking boots and a camera once. Our parliament had to put out an official apology to the man’s family and they posted signs outside the Forest after that.”

“What happened to him?”

Rose smiled wickedly. “He was impaled through the chest on a large branch that had fallen down. On a clear day. In high summer. The Forest enforces its own rules. It was said that because nobody fed it anymore, it was looking for blood anywhere it could get it.”

“Blood?”

“I’ll get to that when I tell you how we put the soul in a Soul-Tree. So the soul and everybody goes into the Forest. The soul going into a tree takes off all of their clothes. They plant an Otorini cedar seed. They use a wooden spade, because metal is forbidden. They pat down the dirt over the seed. Then they lie down. The High Priest drives four wooden stakes into the ground around the person, and ties their hands and feet to them. The person is gagged. Then the High Priest (or Priestess, it was quite an egalitarian organization) takes out a stone knife and cuts a path for the tree to grow and in doing so take in the person’s soul. Through the heart.”

Hux gritted his teeth.

“The last time that happened was about two thousand years ago, give or take. The Kukiri were calling us barbarians and threatening to stop trading cloth and grain with us for ore, maybe start a religious war into the bargain. The old texts say that the creation of Soul-Trees stopped when someone apparently survived that treatment. Flew up to the sky in a ball of glowing blue light and started a new religion. The tree grew anyway. But that’s another story. We don’t really know what happened.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with Muriel,” said Hux. “It is certainly a _fascinating_ look at the practices of another culture.”

“ The majority of historians think this didn’t happen very often, once every ten years or so at _most._ And you’re the man who pulled the plug on the Hosnian System.”  
“They died quickly.”

“Anyhow,” Rose said, “the thing about the Forest of Souls is---was that the souls are still there. If you want---wanted to get expert advice or know your future, you go to the Forest. No metal. No shoes. Some say that you should go alone, during the day, but Paige and I went together at night, when Auntie had gone out to meet with her informant. Strangely enough, that was the old procedure for initiation into the priesthood. Everyone who wanted to join went into the Forest on an appointed night and they would be accepted or rejected based on what happened there. It was mostly Paige’s idea. I didn’t really want to go. She was the bold one. We walked along the dark roads, the bacteria-mists and the stars our only light. We didn’t take a flashlight because it might have drawn unwanted attention on the way to the Forest and we couldn’t use it in there. We stopped at the border. There were two big standing stones to mark the way. Paige and I took off our boots and socks, and our jackets since they had metal zippers. Paige left her blaster in the pile. We reckoned it would be there when we got back because legend had it that any sin you committed in or around the Forest was ten times worse than it would normally be.

Then we went in through the stones. It was darker inside the forest, and we simultaneously reached for each other’s hand. The trees stretched out like soldiers at attention all around us, closing in on the path. Some were relatively young and straight, others had gnarled with age. We kept walking. The path was short, no more than a mile. We were perhaps a third of the way through when I started hearing the voices.”

“The voices?”

“Yes, the souls wanted to talk that night. To me anyway. Some sounded old, a few younger. Some shouted, some whispered, some laughed, some sang. I nudged Paige and asked if she heard them. She said no and looked at me funny. I walked on anyway. She was starting to drag. I remembered that we were here to ask questions. I went over to a tree with a voice that sounded older than mine, but not by too much. I asked it if Paige and I would always stay together. Then I touched the tree, feeling the soft fibers of its bark. Paige screamed at me not to touch it, and then I saw…” she stopped. “I’m not going to tell you what I saw. It wasn’t pretty. And it wasn’t yours to see. I had more visions after that. I asked more questions, all the questions I wanted to ask, and then I felt it.”

“Felt what?”

“Felt like I never wanted to leave this place again. It was beautiful. The trees were so majestic, lit by the glow of the mists. The glow reflected off of the Featherbugs’ carapaces, sparkling around us. And I saw more things, things I hadn’t asked about. I saw explosions and deaths, and I saw births and growth. I sensed everything at once-- the cuts on my calves from the brambles that grew by the path, the cold air, nightcrows hunting,Paige’s hand, the smell of soil. I found an empty patch not too far off the trail and I let go of my sister. I marched through the tangle of thorny vines and laid down. There was soft moss beneath me. It was a nice place to stay. I closed my eyes and I could still see everything.” Rose sighed at the memory of it. “I’ve never felt that way again. Nothing has even come close to it.”

“Were you drugged?” Hux asked, completely missing the point.

“No,” Rose replied. “Paige dragged me away. She says I struggled. Then I stopped and drifted in and out of consciousness. The doctors said I was going into shock. I was hospitalized for two weeks and kept in the dark. Anything else hurt. The visions came back to me in dreams. I think I saw Muriel or Muriel saw me in one of them. She looked a bit younger than she does now and I only saw her once, so I didn’t recognize her today. The voice hasn’t changed much though. ”

“But all you did was walk through a forest.”

“Ah, but it wasn’t just a forest. It was the Forest of Souls. And Paige and I were there at night, together. Under initiation conditions. They got a priest in to look at us right before I was discharged from the hospital. He said it sounded like the Forest chose me and rejected Paige.Of course nobody actually _believes_ the old stories anymore, but we try not to mess with them. That’s how I got this necklace.” She gestured to the pendant around her neck. “In the old days, when someone was called to the priesthood, they would get a two-part necklace. One for them, one for the person it would hurt the most to leave behind when they joined. Always together in spirit. In my case, it was my sister. If I were married, it would be my husband or wife. If I were an only child, the other half would go to my parents. But the priesthood doesn’t---didn’t take children away from their parents to train anymore. They recognized there were problems with that, and the regulations changed to only admit people over the age of majority.”

“It’s metal and you said metal was forbidden in the Forest,” Hux observed.

“That was the point,” Rose replied. “The necklace was meant to remind you of your attachments to the world, of the people who cared for you and relied on you. So you couldn’t just wander off into the Forest and lose yourself. You had to learn and do your duty by them first.”

“What do you mean by losing yourself in the Forest?”

“Sometimes, people who had already talked to the Souls would go in and wander off the path. They were never seen again. Very rarely, their clothes would be found in a crumpled heap, with no blood or signs of a struggle.” _I was so close to that. And Paige wouldn’t let me do it._ Rose was tearing up.

“After the first major bombing run in that area I went back to where the Forest used to stand,” she said, choking back sobs. “Auntie Vi was dead by then and Paige had a hard time playing the responsible adult, so there was no one to stop me. There was only one tree left, one of the older ones. I knew it would die soon because Otorini cedars have weak roots; to stand they need their roots intertwined with those of other trees. I followed the rules. Didn’t do to let the old ways die just because we were. I put down my blaster, took off my shoes, took off the pendant. I walked over to it. I was cutting my feet and calves on the rubble and splinters, but I didn’t care. I put my hands on the scorched bark, and listened. All I could hear were screams.” She took a minute to collect herself.

“The odd thing is, I didn’t understand how people were drawn to the First Order until I went into the Forest of Souls that night when I was ten. There was a bit of a dissonance---my culture prided itself on being so civilized that it was only proper to offer your worst enemy tea and discuss the weather, and tell them that they were forgiven in such an earnest voice that they would wonder when the poison would take effect. Every day for the rest of their miserable life. At the same time, we eviscerated people with stone knives until relatively recently. But that night I got it. I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. Something I could serve, that would grow after my death. I didn’t care about the risk to myself or the pain. I welcomed the pain because I knew I’d transcend it. That there was an order and organization to everything, and I could learn more about it. And if things were back to the way they were in ancient times, I would probably either be tied down waiting for the stone knife or standing over someone and holding it. I’d be okay with that somehow. That disturbed me a lot.”

“So you’re equating the First Order with an archaic practice of human sacrifice?”

“Yes. In your organization,the ends justify the means, do they not?”

Before Hux could say anything, the lighting flickered and Muriel re-appeared. “Oh, you waited for me! This is wonderful. Rose, why are you on the floor? And why is Hux holding your feet up like that?” She moved her hand, and Rose’s body twitched.  
“Don’t move her!” Hux snarled. “She’s on the floor because you dropped her and broke both her ankles if not more.”

Bemused, Muriel gazed down at them. “Is that what normally happens when you drop a human?”

“Yes,” Rose groaned. “We’re pretty breakable.”

“Oh. You can’t just push on the floor and slow your fall like we do?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always wondered how cultures in the Star Wars Universe that weren't exposed to the Jedi handled Force-Sensitive people or understood the Force. This is my take on that.


	10. You Are What You Swear to Destroy

“No, that is not a normal skill that humans have,” Hux replied. “The only people who may have been able to do that were trained Jedi.”

“I’m so glad I’m not a human,” Muriel muttered. “It would be no fun at all. Anyway, back to instructions. Hux, I can’t just tell you what to do because Kylo Ren could read your mind and see my plan. I can’t tell Rose in front of you because then you’d overhear. But Snoke could do this totally awesome thing where he just dropped information into Kylo’s head. I might be able to do that with you. He wrote me a manual.”

Rose flinched. _I’ve never felt so helpless before. Woke up with General Hux this morning, broke both ankles, and now Muriel is trying to mess with my mind again._

“I think that isn’t a very good idea, Muriel. Kylo Ren went through Jedi training and has more power than I ever will. You might put me in a coma and then where would we be?” Hux made frantic shushing motions in her direction, but they were unwarranted as Muriel seemed to consider this information.

“Yes, he did tell me that most people have delicate self-concepts, that if you go in too far you can cause damage. But the thing about you is that you are a moderately strong Force-sensitive, and a very weak Force-user. Most people think that being Force-Sensitive and a user are the same thing, but they’re not.”

“What does that have to do with your ability to enter my mind?”

“It means that you can tolerate more mind-reading and interference than most people can without going crazy. The reason why I _wanted_ to bind with someone who was both a strong Force-sensitive and a weak Force-user was that with you, I can poke around without hurting you much and unlike Kylo Ren, you can’t give me a major fight. Snoke got so mad at Kylo. Every time Kylo had a tantrum, he tried to block my brother out and almost did it a few times. So I decided I’d try you.”

 _Was that a sympathetic look from Hux?_ The General massaged the ring of bruises around his neck and cleared his throat. “You know, I could just step outside for a moment. You could tell Rose your plan; she can tell me the details when the time is right. The simplest option is often the best.”

Muriel shook her head. “Anybody who’s anybody back home could read Rose’s mind without much trouble. Putting ideas in it is harder, but I can do it since we’re bound. If I give her an encrypted version of my plan, Kylo Ren or even some of my family members won’t be able to find it easily. I need to do this.”

“Can’t it wait until I’m back with the Resistance?”, Rose asked. “I would feel more comfortable with this if I had a medbay nearby.”

“I know what you’re doing, Rose. You’re trying to stall, and you’re going to tell Rey.”

 _At least I tried._ Rose felt what she now recognized as Muriel, entering her thoughts like a fisher-bird diving into still water. _The angry child within,_ she used to call this mysterious set of impulses. She instinctively slammed herself against this intruder, as she did many times before. _No. Stop. This is sleep deprivation or a bunch of intrusive thoughts that are not going to help me at all. I need to get up. I need to do the meditations that Auntie showed me. Or take a nap._

_Rose, don’t waste your effort. I had to be subtle before, but I don’t now. It’s not like this is a mind-control program, it’s just a series of instructions that you can choose to follow. Just relax and trust me, Rosie._

Now, every emotion in Rose’s mind flowed out of her subconsciousness like water from a broken dam. _How dare you! What happens next? Will I survive this? I have to live and keep fighting, nobody else I loved did. Get out of my head, Changer. Maybe you could bind to me when I was thirteen and a lonely wreck, but that was only because you were too. I’ve grown up and you haven’t. LEAVE._

_That’s beautiful! You have so many feelings and all this sadness and rage. We can work with that…._

_You call my pain “beautiful”? I HATE you, you sad child…_ Then, everything went black.

Hux stared at Muriel, who had one hand spread open as she stood over Rose and whispered to herself. Rose’s body shook and she whimpered. _I can’t watch anymore. Might as well further the cause of divorce._

He walked into the Chapel’s office area and concluded that the place was not abandoned, merely shabby. A clunky, outdated datapad sat atop a cluttered desk. _Is it password protected? Kriff. It is. Well if I take this away and get Mitaka to look at it, we could figure out what happened here. An artifact like this shouldn’t be too hard to hack._ He pocketed it. Something that might have been guilt called him back to Rose’s side. When Kylo did this sort of thing, he couldn’t stand to watch. It wasn’t any better now. A thin trickle of blood ran from the corner of Rose’s mouth. _Oh no. She can’t take much more of this. Maybe Muriel will kill me. But if I don’t do something, my only known source of information on Snoke’s kind and unconventional Force abilities will die._

“That’s enough!”, he barked. Muriel stopped, surprised that he even dared to question her. “Whatever you’re doing could potentially kill her at this point. Your current work looks like a prisoner Ren interrogated. If you want to destroy Kylo Ren, you can’t act like him.” Muriel reached into a pocket of her dress and pulled out a little golden booklet. She flipped through it.

“Says here some bleeding is normal but…” more page flipping happened. “Bleeding combined with unconsciousness is a sign of potential brain damage.”

“Just having a manual does not suffice,” Hux said. “It’s only useful if you actually read it before you start.”

Muriel looked close to a tantrum again, but reined herself in just in time. “What am I gonna do now?”

“Let her heal. If she comes out relatively unscathed, you can try again. If she dies, well, she’s dead and you’ll make better decisions next time. I would suggest you let me take her in for medical treatment.”

“Alright. Do it. Take care of her. She’s your wife, you have to. And she’s my best friend.”

 _If what this creature calls “friendship” includes mind-probing and the implantation of thoughts, Rose is likely Muriel’s only friend._ This thought made Hux irrationally sad. “I’ll see to her. Go review that manual of yours.” Muriel vanished, leaving him with Rose’s unconscious body.


	11. Prayer of Lies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux makes a calculated decision.  
> c.w. for a flashback to Hux's childhood (death, battlefield trauma), and referenced underage sex (consensual and both participants were in the same age group).

General Hux weighed his options, reminding himself that time was of the essence. If Rose were to have any chance of survival after this, she would need time in a bacta tank, perhaps even the intervention of another Force-user. _If she dies, crucial information and a potential scheme to depose or kill Kylo Ren dies with her._ He briefly considered that Rose’s untimely demise would bolster his credibility with Kylo, but knew that the man had read his mind many a time and seen the hatred that burned within. And in any case letting her die didn’t feel fair. She signed up for a night of drunk misdeeds and a morning of regret, as did Hux. Nothing beyond that. _Careful, you’re getting soft._ Besides, if he saved Rose’s life, she could feel obligated to reciprocate. Those thoughts were what made him firmly push away any plans to abandon her or end her suffering with a blaster to the head as he did for many of Kylo’s victims who were clearly beyond help.

But there was a question of where to take her. If he brought her back to the _Finalizer,_ Kylo would find her. It would only be a matter of time, even if he kept her in the secret Medical Detentions block. She may not be Jedi material, but if she had even the grasp of the Force that Muriel claimed she did (and Hux was beginning to suspect there was more to the story of the Forest of Souls than Rose told him or knew herself), he could reach out and find her. Perhaps Kylo would reward him for delivering another Force-user to him, but a more likely scenario was that he would suspect Hux of collaborating with the girl. His death would undoubtedly follow. He could take her to a private hospital in the city and buy silence, but his budget for bribes was only so high (it had been cut recently due to the enormous volume of equipment destroyed by Ren). They were having to cut benefits for everyone, and might soon be forced to eliminate the Muffin Break. There would be hell to pay from Technical Supervisor Jones if he did that. Silence from Canto Bight hospital staff at all levels and the discreet exit of any spies that happened to be there as General Hux dragged in a half-dead Resistance engineer was too expensive.

That left only one option--delivering her to the Resistance and their medbay. He flinched as he imagined the reception he would get there. But it was in the spirit of diplomacy--that was what that kriffing reception was about last night, wasn’t it? First Order General brings a worse-for-wear Resistance engineer back safely--okay, not safely, alive, that was still something. It would be less of a diplomatic disaster than having Rose Tico permanently vanish after last being seen with him. _It’s all about minimizing damage now,_ he told himself. _Now let’s get her back to the Resistance before she dies on you. And not think about how returning her safely should have been a priority last night._

He bound up her ankles with the scraps of his shirt, pleased that the bleeding had stopped and there seemed to be little risk of gangrene as they still felt warm. Sliding one arm under her legs and another under her shoulders, he executed what was meant to be a bridal carry. Something in his back popped and his knees screamed in agony. He collapsed under her. Being thrown against walls on a regular basis had taken a toll on his body. And Rose was heavier than any girl her size should imaginably be. The curves added some weight, but from the fog of last night he recalled that under her softness lay a core of pure muscle, and her bulky shirt hid well-toned arms. It seemed that the Resistance kept even their engineers in fighting shape. _In fine enough form to keep me on the ground even while unconscious,_ he thought. Levering her off of him, he got up. Nothing for it but to summon some reserves of strength he prayed he had and try again. This was entirely unrelated to his neglect of his own physical training over the past few months.

He grunted and lifted her again. Rose’s eyelids fluttered. _Good sign._ He thought his grip on her was more secure this time. Kicking open the door, he stepped outside with arms full of Rose. The door nearly swung back and hit them. Staggering, he took his first steps down the street. It was still deserted, thank the Stars. If anyone saw them, he’d tell them he found her black-out drunk somewhere and was simply paying the Resistance the courtesy of returning her in compliance with their new treaty. Rose began to thrash. _Promising. If only she’d save it for the medbay…_ She opened and shut her mouth. And spoke.

“Paige I don’t wanna go to school today. I had nightmares all last night, not a wink of sleep, give me the blankets back. Please.”

 _Delirious._ But she was talking. He read somewhere that the best thing to do under these circumstances was play along. “You have to go to school, Rose. Get up and stop whining, we need to get moving soon or we’ll both be late.”

“You don’t sound like Paige,”she whispered, and was silent again. He was starting to get back into the old rhythm of marching while carrying a body. The motion and the weight brought back things he’d tried to forget. Once he’d carried somebody else. Looked down at their face through eyes blurred by tears. Couldn’t wipe them away with his sleeve.

 _“Leave him boy! There’s nothing left for him. You’ll make us miss the transport back.”_  
_Hux looked at his father’s face bloodstreaked face, flushed nearly to that color with rage at his son’s sentimental lollygagging, as he called it later. After sending Armitage to medbay for causes other than combat injuries._

_“No. I’m not leaving him here.” On the battlefield, Brendol Hux couldn’t very well stop the retreat to harangue his son. And Armitage never openly defied his father. This was something new._

_“Fine, boy. Be weighed down by someone who will die soon anyway and miss the transport. Die with your toy on this arsehole of a planet, for all I care. Anyone who disobeys orders so flagrantly on the field of battle is no son of mine.”_

I don’t want to be your son, _Armitage thought but did not say. His father went on ahead, and he staggered on with his chosen burden. Cadet Ingvar. Elias to him. Dark hair, tan skin. Good with languages, something Armitage struggled with. Two years older than him. Tutored him in translation and how to appreciate another’s strength and body without feeling pain or shame. Kept the darkness at bay for a few golden months. It was like he had a sixth sense that told him when Armitage would have a rough night, and on those nights he would pull him out of his dreams and into his arms, running his hands down his back and softly reassuring him._

 _“It’s just a dream, Armie. I’ve got you. In three years you’ll get your commission and you’ll get stationed away from him. I’m right here for you, understand? Stay with me.”_  
_Now, he lay broken in his lover’s arms, crying out from time to time. Armitage found himself repeating variants of the things Elias whispered to him. “I’ve got you, Elias. I’m here for you. I won’t leave. Stay with me. Please.”_

_Elias gasped, those perfect lips leaking blood. Hux thought he might have a lung punctured by a rib, that was treatable enough if he rushed him to medbay for emergency surgery…”I’ve got you, I’m here, I won’t leave, stay with me. Please.”_

_He nearly ran up the slope, up the ramp to the ship and medbay. “I’ve got you, I’m here, I won’t leave. Stay.” He dumped him onto a stretcher. The medic sat him down in a chair. Armitage exploded.“You should be treating Cadet Ingvar! He most likely has a punctured lung, a concussion…”_

_The medic put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, son. You were so brave. You did everything you could. He didn’t make it.” Hux burst into tears._

_Part of it was the medic’s use of “son”. That was meant to comfort, but it stung in his ears. Then grim realization set in. Cadet Armitage Hux cried into that medic’s arms like a kriffing little baby as the medbay door slid open to reveal his father. After that, Armitage vowed never to make the mistake of sleeping with anyone he cared about again. Or develop an emotional attachment in the first place._

He took deep breaths. This one was a woman. That he’d only really known briefly in the carnal sense while drunk. Resistance Scum. Wasn’t suffering from blaster wounds or a crushed ribcage either.

“Leave me, Paige!” Rose was gabbling again. “I saw what happens. You die. Auntie dies. Maybe you’ll live if the Forest takes me. I don’t want to see it twice. Let me go! I want to join them, want to be free, please…” She trailed off as her fractured consciousness retreated.

“Stay with me, Rose.” Hux said in the same voice he used so long ago. “We’ll get you out of this and into a hospital bed. I won’t leave you. I’ve got you.” He was reciting the old prayer of lies. _You taught it to me, Elias. Now I’m using it again._ It was cold comfort, but better than none. He could see the Resistance fleet ahead, including that piece of junk they called the _Millenium Falcon._

“I’ve got you. I won’t leave you. Stay with me, please.”

He was vaguely aware of other things. Shouts. A blaster pressed into his back and Poe Dameron with a murderous look in his eyes. A pair of medics whisking Rose out of his arms, carrying her away on a stretcher. The fact that he hadn’t eaten anything since early last night. Funny. The horizon spun, the sunlight flashed orange, and he decided he rather liked the concrete of this landing strip. That was the last thing he recalled before slipping blissfully into unconsciousness.


	12. Sisters and Friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey tries to help Rose. There are feelings in this chapter.  
> I have taken some liberties with the canon timeline.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Rey confessed to Dr. Kalonia as they stood over Rose’s still form, which was now encased in a bacta-suit. “You’re the doctor here. Do you think she’s…”

Kalonia shrugged. “If this were just a physical trauma patient, I’d say she was fine. Hux took good care of the wounds; no signs of infection or tissue death. Yes, a couple of ribs are broken but they didn’t puncture anything. I scanned her brain and she isn’t concussed. The fractures on the ankles indicate quite a fall though. And none of that explains why she remains unconscious.”

“She’s not in a coma?”

“No. Watch. Rose?”

Her eyes flicked open and she stared up at them blankly. Kalonia briefly shone a light into her eyes and the pupils constricted. “She responds to stimuli and her brainstem reflexes are still there. Scans can only tell me so much about what’s going on in her mind.”

Rey looked close to tears. “What did General Hux have to say about this?”

“Still out of it. He’s moved from passed out to asleep and dead to the world. Frankly, he looked like he needed it. I can wake him up if you want me to, but it helps that I have time for his bloodwork to run.”

“His bloodwork?”

“Have you ever wondered why General Hux is so skinny and pasty?”

Rey scoffed. Normally she got along with the motherly doctor, but these comments seemed a distraction from Rose’s perilous state. “He’s lived on a ship all his life and believes that luxuries like food are for the weak. Why do we care?”

Kalonia held up a black oblong case, designed to fit into a greatcoat pocket. She popped open the lid, revealing an object with a molded plastic grip and a plunger.

“Epinephrine injector. He has a lethal allergy to something, but it could be one of thousands of options. The allergen must be commonly found, otherwise he wouldn’t carry this around in his pocket. Normally the prescription information would be written on the case, but for the General that would be a recipe for assasination. He will need food when he wakes up, but I don’t want to kill him.”

“You’re probably the only person who feels that way,” Rey said. She had her own ideas about the things that might have happened to Rose last night, and if any of them were remotely true she wouldn’t hesitate to beat Hux into a bloody ginger pulp with her staff. Simple Force-choking was too good for him.

“I took an oath,” Kalonia reminded her. “First do no harm. And if I were to kill him by anaphylactic shock(a truly awful thing), you couldn’t interrogate him.”

“You’re right, Doctor. I just wish there were something I could do for Rose right now.”

Kalonia frowned. “It would help if I had some idea of what was going on inside of her head. This looks like Kylo Ren’s work especially combined with the choke marks on Hux, but we have well-documented proof that he was not with either of them last night. And crossing a Force-user isn’t the only way to get choke marks. Or an interesting collection of bruises that were not consistent with a struggle.”

“What?” Rey sputtered.

“I took his greatcoat off and put a medbay-issue shirt on him. I saw.”

“Yick. I don’t want to think about that. What can I do for Rose?”

Kalonia sighed. “I wouldn’t normally advocate this, but you said that you successfully read her thoughts without inflicting any trauma before. You could do it again. I don’t want to hear about her darkest secrets or first kiss, I just want to know if she’s in there or not.”

“There would still be a risk though.”

“The potential risk outweighs the benefits. Besides”, she gestured to Rose’s closed eyes and emotionless expression, “I honestly don’t think you could make this any worse.”

Rey felt a lump in her throat. “I...I need to think about this. It doesn’t feel right.” _It feels like something Kylo Ren would have done, rummaging through someone’s mind while they were immobilized. I’m not doing that to Rose._

The older woman patted her shoulder. “Think about it. You’ve got time. Rose is stable.”

“So is a corpse, Doctor.”

Suddenly, Dr. Kalonia looked very old. “I know, Rey.” She left to check Hux’s bloodwork results and see if he was still sleeping, leaving Rey alone with her memories.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Rose asked Rey to read her mind the night after their small memorial service for Paige. They were getting ready for bed in her room. Well, their room now. It had bunked beds and Rose was too numb to ask for a new room assignment. In the post-battle chaos, nobody had realized what the sight of an empty bunk would do to Rose. Except for Rey. She saw it in her eyes, and asked. After all, she was such a new arrival and her presence with the Resistance was so sporadic that she didn’t have an official room assignment yet. Rose still had to sort Paige’s things, but it was easier with someone who would make her tea and hold her while she cried. It helped to clean out the ghosts of Paige’s everyday life-- her hair ties, a half-empty tube of moisturizing lotion, a stub of lipstick, laundry in a bag, an old durasheet instrument maintenance log. They ran her dirty uniforms through the laundry and folded them neatly. The quartermaster would want any usable official material. As much as anyone hated to admit it, they were dressing new recruits in dead pilots’ boots and uniforms. Rose comforted herself with the thought that Paige would have hated waste.

Some things she kept in a little box, like a bracelet Paige wore on special occasions, pictures of them together, her sparkly lucky rock streaked with ore, rescued from the spoil heap back home. The rest they silently stuffed into black trash bags. It felt like the burial Paige never got as they tossed the last one down the garbage chute, and when Rose tearfully said that, Rey looked at her thoughtfully.

“Maybe we could have some kind of gathering to remember her by.”

Rose protested. “We had a memorial for all of the pilots last week. Everyone’s lost somebody. It doesn’t feel right to make a fuss about Paige. She wouldn’t have liked it.”

“I don’t mean in front of everybody. I mean in here. We’ve gotten the place cleaned up. I was thinking just you, me, Poe, and Finn. If you’re comfortable with that. And anyone else you want there. Poe probably needs it, weren’t they close once?”

She nodded. “Yes. They were. I think that’s a good idea.” Rose didn’t let herself grieve in public, or draw attention to the fact that it was her sister who died. Except for when Finn found her, but she was hiding then. Paige would have approved. So would Auntie Vi, for that matter. She’d been taught all her life that emotions were something you expressed alone, or with only a few trusted people. It was sound advice growing up against the backdrop of the First Order, but when you were hurting around people who knew and worried it was a hindrance.

So a couple of days after they’d sorted everything and moved in Rey’s few possessions, Finn and Poe showed up after dinner. Poe brought a bottle of something strong and cheap. Finn brought rations and a bar of chocolate that he’d conjured up from somewhere.

“We did this kind of thing when a trooper in my squad died, if we had time.” Finn said. “Of course, there wasn’t much in the way of food. We just used the dead trooper’s ration chip and shared their last meal out.” Nobody said anything for a while. “Sorry, that was kind of depressing.” More awkward silence. But Finn was determined to break it. “I didn’t know Paige, but I wish I did,” he said. “Rose told me a lot. The thing that really stuck with me was that life would have been a lot easier for them growing up if they’d just collaborated with the First Order. Rose said that there were lots of recruiters hanging around their school. Paige and Rose could have left their planet earlier and gotten regular meals, training, guaranteed employment, and brainwashing. But they knew what the First Order stood for, the things it did, and they fought back. Paige chose to keep fighting and join the Resistance, chose to have a life and death that meant something. And that’s something I’m working on, having a choice and committing to it. Choosing what to live for also means choosing what to die for.” Rose blushed when he looked at her, remembering how they met.

Poe went next, taking some time to compose himself. “Paige was one of the best pilots I’ve ever worked with,” he began. “Not just because she was an amazing shot and could make that bomber move like it was an extension of her. She had the right mindset for a pilot too, she didn’t let herself think too long on the ways she could fail, she focused on what she needed to do to do to succeed. Most importantly, she knew when to hold back. When a battle wasn’t worth fighting. Nobody worried about her doing anything stupid.” He teared up again. “I wish I were more like her.” Finn put an arm around him.

“What’s done is done,” Rose said. “I don’t blame you.” They passed the bottle around. She gagged as the burning liquid slid down her throat.

Rey spoke next. “I didn’t know Paige, but I do know how much she meant to everyone around her, how many lives she touched. She was a good pilot for the Resistance and brave, they said. Rose told me she pretty much raised her. I don’t completely understand the Force, but I know that it binds all beings across the universe. We’ve each got a little bit of it in us. The old Jedi code says: ‘There is no death, there is the Force.’ I’d like to think that Paige has returned to the Force, and is still watching over us today.”

Rose lost it at that point. Rey put her arms around her, and Finn and Poe joined in. They stayed like that for a long time. Finally, Rose wiped her eyes on Finn’s shoulder and cleared her throat. “Paige was the best big sister I could’ve asked for. We competed with each other and fought sometimes, but at the end of the day we knew that we stayed together, no matter what. She was very patient with me. She taught me how to shoot a blaster, how to fight dirty. Sometimes, she’d tell me stories. Her scary ones were the best, because even if the monsters she made up terrified me, she always told me about a way to defeat them. I couldn’t keep a secret from her, and she knew almost everything about me. I miss her so much, I don’t think I’ll ever stop. But she left me a lot to do. I can’t mope around forever, I have to keep fighting for hope. For her.” She was crying again. The bottle went round once more, this time accompanied by the rations and the chocolate. The chocolate was delicious. The last time she’d had any was as a young child, so it was fitting that it was served at a gathering dedicated to her sister’s memory.

The night went on. Rose and Poe had mostly cried it all out, so the second half of the evening was dedicated to the happy memories they had together. Poe told the story of how Paige had pranked the whole squad by making elaborate fake Rathar tentacles out of discarded rubber tire strips. “I don’t know how she managed to melt the plastic and mold them so realistically,” Poe said.

“I helped,” Rose replied with a tipsy giggle. “I had a welding torch and some resin for molds. Paige did the actual sculpting with clay.”

“Oh. That explains it. She got those tentacles and stuck them out of the instrumentation hatches in all the X-wings. We all deserved it. Paige was frustrated that some of the pilots were blowing off the on-ground safety inspections and didn’t want anyone to get hurt, so she set it up so everyone would find them during our equipment check. See, during the equipment check you were supposed to open all the panels including the instrumentation hatch and check that everything was in order before you even got in the cockpit to check the controls. If everyone performed their equipment checks correctly, they would have found the ends of the tentacles in the instrumentation hatch and ruined the prank. But because people weren’t doing that, they got in the cockpits without checking and had ‘Rathar tentacles’ dangling over them as they sat down. In a stroke of absolute genius, she found a recording of Rathar calls and put it on all the fighters’ comms. The pilots ran out screaming. I almost shit my pants. Nobody banthashitted their equipment check again.” Everyone laughed. Rose almost felt like she had a family again. It got late. Finn and Poe left after helping tidy up. Rey and Rose went to bed, and the creaks of the cheap mattress above her as Rey rolled over lulled Rose to sleep. It was good to hear those noises again.

The next day passed in a blur for Rose. She still felt the dull ache of her missing sister, but it helped knowing that she didn’t grieve alone. And she had a roommate to talk to now. After her shift finished, she took a shower and returned to their room. Rey was already in there, reading an old book(Where had she found that? Those were rare) in the top bunk. Paige’s old bunk. But it was better than seeing it empty.

“Long day?” Rey asked.

“Busy but good,” Rose replied. “How was yours?”

“Frustrating. I’m reading up on ways to get to Kylo Ren. If I can make him turn, we can take on the First Order together.”

Rose frowned. “Are you sure it will work like that, Rey? If you make him leave the First Order, that’s like giving them a million credits in equipment not destroyed. Plus there are all the officers and troopers he kills in those tantrums. My theory is that he's an undercover Resistance agent.”

“True,” Rey said, “but lightsabers can stop blaster bolts, and two Force-users working together can lift a lot.”

“So you want to destroy the landscape _with_ him instead of destroying the landscape _fighting_ him.”

Rey sighed. “Yes. We could have such an awesome battle together if we weren’t trying to kill each other.”

“You’re a sucker for a big lightsaber.”

“Only literal lightsabers. I want to know what he did to get that crossguard. I like the aesthetic, but it’s not something I personally would do. It looks like he fractured the crystal, which would destabilize the core...”

“Or an eight-pack.”

“Actually, the eight-pack doesn’t do it for me. I didn’t like it when he took his shirt off. It made me realize that I need to train more and eat actual protein. Anyway, I’m not attracted to men.”

Rose paused. _Did that mean she was attracted to women? Would she want to…_ Her next words shattered that fleeting dream.

“I’m not attracted to women either. Or anyone from any species. The most I feel when I see a beautiful person is appreciation. But I feel exactly the same way when I see a sunset or sunrise, or the hills of Ach-To. I mean I like what I see, but I don’t want to do anything with it. It’s not that I don’t like being touched, it’s just that I only like it with clothes on. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I’ve always been that way.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you,” Rose said. “I’ve known a couple of people like that. In any case nothing would ever get done in this Galaxy if everyone was attracted to everyone all the time.”

Rey looked relieved. “Thanks. Kylo doesn’t really understand it. He thinks I’m just repressing things.”

“He has read your mind. Are you sure you’re not?”

Rey made a face. “He genuinely thinks that black eyeliner is a good look for him and that if he can only develop asthma or some other breathing problem, he’ll actually become Darth Vader. Don’t underestimate his powers of denial in the face of cold hard facts. Those things are untrue and I will never be sexually attracted to him. Or anybody else.”

“Good. I mean it’s good that you know yourself and you’re sure.” Kriff, that was awkward.

Rose laid out her clothes for the next day. Rey stuck a bookmark in her book, and clambered down from the top bunk to put it on the table.

“One of the Jedi texts?” Rose asked.

“Yep. I managed to steal it.”

“Nice.”

“Rey?”

“Yes?”

“This is going to sound super weird and gross, but would you be okay with reading my mind?”

Rey was taken aback. “Why do you want me to read your mind?”

“I want to know how it feels. And I worry about some of the stuff I think these days. This morning I just wanted to put my fist through this lousy beautiful Galaxy. I _said_ it, too. At the cafeteria table. Finn asked me if I was okay. It sounded awful, just like something Kylo Ren would write in his diary. Not like something I would actually think or say while sober. I’m almost worried about turning into him. Sometimes I’m as angry as I was at age thirteen. That wasn’t a good time for me. I wrote _poems._ They were terrible. Paige said if my poetry were used to interrogate prisoners, the technique would be banned in five systems.”

“Anger is a normal part of the grieving process, Rose. You’re fine.” Rey looked concerned.

“That’s what everyone says! But the problem with going crazy is that you don’t think you are. You’ve seen Kylo Ren’s mind. It would mean a lot to me if you just took one quick look and went: ‘Ah, not at all like that manchild’s mind, you're doing fine.’”

Rey understood now. “Alright. But I haven’t read a lot of minds. My guess is that there are some things common to all people, so it’s probably not going to be a simple matter of going in and saying: ‘nothing to see here’.”

“But you did see the darkness in Kylo.”

“Yes.”

“So you’ll be able to recognize it in me.”

“Possibly. You’re not a Force-user, so it might show up differently in you if it’s there. But if you really want me to, I’ll try.”

“Thank you, Rey. Is there anything you need me to do first?”

“Get comfortable. Close your eyes. It’s supposedly easier if you’re relaxed.” Rose lay down on her bed and shut her eyes. Rey moved over to her, skimming a hand over her forehead and neck. “You’re still tense. Think about something calming. Breathe deep.”

Rose focused on her breaths, slipping back into her old patterns of meditation.

Rey said nothing. She had never been in the mind of someone besides Kylo Ren before. She heard about the theory, but the practice was worlds different. At first, Rose’s mind appeared blank. _She’s meditating,_ Rey realized. _She isn’t thinking anything right now._

That was surprising. But then Rey matched her breaths to Rose’s, and slipped into a gap as Rose considered the crick in her neck and the presence of the other woman beside her. Rey wasn’t sure what she was expecting. Kylo’s mind was like a space battle, with two warring ideologies struggling for dominance. Rose’s mind was nothing like that. There was a dark forest. Glowing mists swirled around the green tree trunks. For all the forest’s darkness, it was different from the Dark Side of the Force present in Kylo, mysterious rather than malicious. Rey willed herself to enter it through a pair of standing stones. _Maybe everybody has a different thing in their mind. Mine’s the ocean around Ach-To, Kylo’s is the void of space, and Rose’s is this place. I need to read more minds, this could just be coincidence._

There was a path in the forest, twisting and unmeasurably long. It forked out into other little tracks, but something told Rey these were best left unexplored. One was blocked off with a fallen log, another crisscrossed with thick dew-studded spider webs. Insects flew into the mists, and the shrill cries of what she only assumed were birds made the hairs on her neck stand on end. One of them flapped across the path in front of her. She looked at the sides of the path. There were brambles, growing low to the ground. One of them dripped with blood. Rey felt the trees almost closing in on her. _I shouldn’t be here,_ she thought. She left the forest and wandered around the field in front of it. A wind blew, and in it she faintly heard thoughts. Ideas their thinker was trying hard to suppress. _I’ll never be as brave as Paige. I will live alone, die alone. I am nothing, and everyone just hangs around me because they pity me._

Rey had seen enough. She left her friend’s mind. The thoughts made her sad. “Okay, I’m done. How did it feel?” Rose opened her eyes and sat up.

“It didn’t feel like anything much. I felt like I had forgotten something important, but I didn’t know what it was.”

“Hmm.” Rey frowned. “You aren’t nothing. You're not alone either. Stop telling yourself that. If you do that enough, you’ll believe it.”

Rose looked embarrassed. “You could hear that?”

“You were thinking it and I was in your mind, of course I did.”

“Oh. Did it feel anything like Kylo Ren’s?”

“No, nothing like his mind did. What was that forest?”

Rose blushed. “A-a place I went once, back on Hays Minor. I think about it. A lot.”

“It was pretty. A little scary though. But in a good way.”

“Thanks.”

Rey was exhausted from the effort of reading Rose’s mind. “Can we have lights-out now?”

“Sure. You can get into bed first, I’ll turn it off.”

“Thanks.”

“No, thank you. I feel so much better knowing that you don’t think I’m turning into Kylo Ren.”

“You’re welcome.”

“‘Night, Rey.”

“‘Night, Rose.”

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Rose kicked, first one foot then the other. She moved her hands. Rey held her breath. Maybe she’d wake up. But nothing happened after that for a good five minutes. Until Rose began to scream.”Shh, you’re alright Rose, it’s me Rey! You’re in medbay…” This had no effect. Huge blisters appeared on her hands. _I have to go in there, anything could be going on! The worst that could happen probably already has._ Throwing caution to the wind, Rey sat down on the chair next to the hospital bed, took a few deep breaths, and entered Rose’s mind. It was easier this time.

She made it to the field. The sky was darker than it was last time, and there was a distinct smell of smoke. It was coming from the forest. Disregarding her hesitation last time, she ran in. The brambles whipped at her calves. The path seemed to lengthen as she ran, but the smell was getting stronger. The birds she heard last time shrieked at her as if to say: “Hurry up girl! We don’t have all night!” Finally, the path ended in front of a huge tree, twisted and wide like the dead one on Ach-To. This tree still had green needles. It creaked ominously. She heard sobbing. There was a little track worn around the trunk, so she followed it. There was Rose, illuminated by a growing fire. The flames were coming from the cracks in the lid of a metal storage container, glowing red-hot. Her hands were burnt.

“Rey! You’re here?! Get out while you can or she might trap you too.”

Rey looked at her in surprise. “Who is _she_? And what is that thing?”  
“Muriel. Snoke’s little sister. I can’t get out of here until I open this box. I don’t know how to get rid of it. And now,” she gestured to her burnt hands, “I realize that whatever is in there should stay locked away.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the cliffhanger, folks. But school is getting to me so I will probably not post anything until after New Years. Rest assured they'll both get out of Rose's mind. I don't have the rest written out, but I do know where it's going next...  
> Also this fic has no beta so I edit for typos, word choice, and grammatical stuff as I go. When it's complete I will give it a final read over for that.


	13. Limbo

Rey watched as sparks leapt from the tortured metal panels, catching on the moss around the tree. Rose jumped and stomped them out, but more came. The tree moaned like an old man in pain.

“I know, love,” Rose said to it. “It’s not much, but I’m doing my best.” The box shuddered and the lid buckled. “Maybe I’ll fail you again. But if that happens, we’ll fall together this time.” She turned to it and planted a kiss on the ridged bark, her cracked and bleeding lips staining the trunk. The red drops slowly faded into the tree’s trunk, and Rey could have sworn she heard a little sigh. Rose ran her fingers over the pendant around her neck, fiddling with it until she held the clasp in her fingers. “My attachments,” she whispered. “Rey, shouldn’t I let them all go? Didn’t the Jedi say attachment was forbidden?”

Rey moved in and took Rose’s hands in hers. The clasp dropped. “The Jedi were wrong about many things. I think that was one of their mistakes.” She turned the necklace back to its usual configuration. “Where are we? What is this place?”

“You’ve been here before, Rey. It’s my mind.”

“I know that, but why is it a forest?”

“It’s the Forest of Souls. Or at least my memories of it.”

Rey nearly asked “What is the Forest of Souls?”, but then she remembered. She was in Rose’s _mind._ She listened and waited. _We live here,_ came a voice. _All the souls chosen to live on in a Soul-Tree. If things were different, Rose might have been one too. We should not have stopped the old ways. If the young respected the traditions and actually kept training Listeners rather than pandering to the weak of soul and faith, Hays Minor may not have died._

A different voice criticised this one. It sounded like an older woman. _All things die, and are born again. A planet is no exception. It serves no purpose to speculate idly. The task that remains now is to try to save the last of us._

A younger voice chimed in. _You said it, Teacher. And it hurt more than they told me it would. I’m glad it didn’t happen to Rose._

 _Can this new one see us?_ Someone else asked. _Rose can hear us, but our forms are not visible to her._

 _As it should be,_ the original voice said. _We entered this state to divorce the pure soul from the sinful flesh…_

Rose clutched at her hair. “Stop, everyone. I need to think about how to deal with this. Either there’s going to be some magical thing I can do to get rid of the flames, or I need to figure out the most painless way for us to die. I can’t do it with you all talking at me at once. You’re just a bunch of intrusive thoughts right now.”

 _Learn from the pain,_ said the first voice again. Rey didn’t like him. _Let it be your guide, your transcension from the temporary body._

 _Ha ha. No._ The child’s voice sounded bitter. _I endured it for the greater good. I didn’t enjoy it. I think you did though._

 _That’s enough, Lessi,_ the older woman’s voice responded. _And we would appreciate your silence too, Esho. I am sorry, child. But what is done is done. I failed you. We’re here. I know I ought to think of it as a blessing, but it came at such a high cost._

_It’s not your fault, Genea. I was strong in some things, but weak where it mattered. I saw my possible future too, you know. It could have been much worse. This was the best option from a set of bad choices. You’re still my teacher. You helped me figure out what was going on at the beginning and you were there for me at the end._

Rey squinted, pulling on the Force and focusing. The figures were faint and outlined in a green-tinged light , but she could see an older woman, dark-skinned and sad-eyed. She wore a complicated looking set of robes. She held a little girl by the hand. The child was paler and dressed in a simpler shift, no older than ten. Her hair was the same shade as Rose’s, held in place by a wooden clip. Both wore versions of Rose’s necklace. Other people stretched out beyond them, their forms indistinct.

 _Oh, she can see us!_ Lessi waved. _Hello, Interloper! You don’t live in here, but it doesn’t look like you forced your way in. Rose must like you._

“I do like Rey,” Rose replied. “And I can hear all of you too, thank you very much.”

 _Let’s go, child. This is work for the living, not for memories. We will hinder them if we stay here overlong._ Lessi pouted but let Genea lead her away. The woman and the girl walked down a dark path, their glowing outlines gradually fading from view.

“You have Force Ghosts in your mind?” Rey was dumbfounded.

“They’re not Force Ghosts. Not really. They’re bound up in a place that doesn’t exist anymore. I heard their voices from time to time. I saw all of them once, but that was a special occasion.”

Clearly Rose didn’t want to talk. “If we get out of this I’ll tell you the whole story later. But now I need to figure out how to stop Muriel from burning my whole karking mind down.”

She sat down on the moss-covered ground, leaning against the bulk of the giant Otorini cedar tree. Rose closed her eyes and tried to do her breathing exercises. _In. Hold it. Out._ They weren’t working. She felt Rey’s gaze on her.

Rey could hear Rose’s thoughts, against the background of the quietly panicking Not-Force-Ghosts and the crackling of the flames. _I’ll die then. As I should. The Galaxy won’t be ruled by a child. Hux won’t get his revenge. I will no longer be the pawn of an unskilled player. This will all become somebody else’s problem._

Rey practically screamed at her. “You can’t do that Rose! You are going to survive this, I’ll kill Kylo Ren, Hux will get executed for war crimes, Finn and Poe are going to start an orphanage for Stormtrooper kids, and we’ll”...she trailed off, unsure exactly of what they would do together in the absence of the First Order. Or what to say to someone she loved fiercely, someone she wanted to spend as much of her life as she could with, although they didn’t always want the same things. “We’ll make bread together with actual flour, not just portions. And watch trashy holo-dramas with Finn and Poe. We can watch the sunrise over the sea on Ach-To and see the Porgs fly, I think you’d like to visit there…” She was babbling. Rose slumped over, her body limp and sinking into the moss. “You’re going to get through this because I won’t let you give up! Now sit up and tell me why everything in your mind looks the way it does. And if you can change it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about Hux. And since Rey is poking around Rose's mind, he'll come up soon enough.


	14. Make Up Your Mind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey helps Rose help herself. Rey and other people learn more than they should know, from a certain point of view.

Rose pushed herself up off the ground, leaning on the tree trunk. Rey helped her up. They stood together, Rey’s arm around her. The fires kept burning.

“Why does your mind look like this?” Rey asked. “I know you said the forest was somewhere important to you back on Hays Minor. But why is there a field outside the forest? Is it always twilight or later here, or is it only like that when I am around?”

Rose shrugged. “It is the way I remember it when I was ten years old. When the Forest of Souls was still there. I went there at night, so I suppose that is why it’s dark.”

“Ah.” Rey thought for a minute. _As long as I can remember, I saw the sea of Ach-To in my dreams. Even though I had never been there before. But Rose’s abilities are different from mine. This place seems to respond to her, and she to it. Maybe we can use that._

“Rose, did it rain on Hays Minor?”

She seemed confused by the question. “Of course it did. The rains came in autumn and only left in late spring.”

Rey smiled. “That must have been wonderful. On Jakku it only rained a few days in a standard year. When it rained, I put out all the buckets and bowls I had to catch the water. I stripped off my clothes and let it wash me. I sat outside all day. I would have given anything to have it rain like that.”

“It stopped being ‘wonderful’ when the acid rain got bad. The First Order set out such insanely high quotas for ore that we didn’t have time to cover and store things properly. When I left with Paige, the fisheries were all gone, crop harvests were pitiful, and they said that if you stood in a downpour with your eyes open it would sting.”

Rey saw a young Rose standing out in what looked like a schoolyard with a group of other girls. The raindrops splattered off of their raincoats and a drain noisily gurgled nearby. “Dare you to get one in your eye, Tico.” A tall girl protected by a yellow umbrella issued this challenge. “Bet you’re too scared of the acid. You cried when we watched the news in Civics and Forestry Minister Sanen said these rains would probably stop the Cedars from seeding in twenty years. It wasn’t a sad holo, it was a _news broadcast._ What is it with you and the Cedars? It’s kind of creepy and weird how much you know about them.”

“I did not cry,” Rose said. “I was just interested, that’s all. Unlike some people, I actually pay attention in class. And I’m gonna pass the University entry exams for Kukiri National when I’m seventeen. They have the best Environmental Engineering course on the planet. They don’t let very many people in.” She glared at the other child with all the righteous self-confidence of an eleven year old girl. Then she lowered the hood of her coat, opened her eyes wide, and lay down on the grimy asphalt. The rain washed over her face, soaking into her hair. She stayed like that for a long time, her tiny still form giving a credible impression of a corpse.

“Is she okay?” someone asked. “Should we get Miss Solis? She isn’t blinking.”

Rose got up. “You know, the pH of the rain is actually more than the pH of Toim-berry juice. And we drink that. So I’m not scared and you’re stupid to think that the rain’s actual acid.” A bell rang and she pushed her way through the doors of the building, leaving the others behind. Rey could feel her emotions in the memory-- shame that she let the other girl make her so angry, pride at showing the girl (her name was Yelin) that she disregarded both taunts and physical discomfort. The drops of water didn’t sting.

The memory dissipated. It seemed to Rey that the air somehow got damper in the time that she took to watch Rose’s memory.

“Could you make it rain in here? A nice long downpour would put out that fire.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried to change things. I have no idea how to do that. Can you use the Force to make it rain?”

“That’s not how the Force works. And if I did things in your mind, I’d be scared of kriffing something up. This is your mind. I know you can meditate. If you can stop yourself from thinking, you can think about certain things on purpose.”

“That’s a good point. Let’s see if it works.” Rose closed her eyes and visualized all the rains she remembered from her childhood. Droplets of water rolling down window panes. Thunder rumbling, a sound that made her flinch because she was never entirely sure whether it meant a First Order bomber was flying low or if it was just ordinary thunder. It signified either a torrent of fire or water. _Water. You can’t think about fire. More hard rain. Footpaths turning to streams. Flashes of lightning. Getting caught out, wet clothing sticking to skin. Rubber boots filling up. Mud squelching underfoot. The moss gets greener, and the land drinks it all._

She looked up at the perpetually dark sky. Thunder rumbled and lightning illuminated Rey’s face. And they heard the soft patter of raindrops on the ground beneath them. Rey spun around gleefully, leaping into the air and humming to herself as she did as a child on Jakku. Rose laughed. “You really do like rain.”

“It’s one of the best things in the Galaxy.” Rey’s enthusiasm was contagious; Rose joined her. The fires gradually fizzled out, the flames that formerly burst from the abused box retreating. The hot metal hissed as the raindrops hit it. It ceased to glow.

They walked over to it, and the rainstorm tapered off into a drizzle. “Thank you, Rey.”

“You did all the work. This is your mind, after all. Are you going to open the box soon?”

“I want to wait for it to cool off a little. And I don’t think you should be there when I open it.”

“Why shouldn’t I be there?”

“Muriel said it was a set of instructions for me, information she tried to drop into my mind so I would know it but other people wouldn’t be able to read it. I don’t know what could happen to you. Or what the information would do if there were two people in my mind at once. I don’t want to find out. If I start screaming again and foaming at the mouth or something you can go back in but be warned that it’s probably dangerous. The Resistance can’t afford to lose the Last Jedi to some weird alien mind-trick equivalent of malware. But it can afford to lose a mechanical engineer. There are others with my training. You are the only person I know of besides Kylo Ren who can use a lightsaber and lift boulders.”

Rose’s words were true, but they hurt to hear. “Alright. I’ll leave. But come back, please. If you don’t finish whatever it is you have to do in there by this time tomorrow, I’m going in again. If you start acting possessed or something, I’ll go in and check on you.”

“Okay. That sounds like a plan. While you’re talking with Dr. Kalonia, can you please get me a levonorgestrel? I uh, was kind of stupid last night.” _There’s no way in the Galaxy I’m carrying General Hux’s child._ That thought was quickly suppressed, but Rey heard it anyway.

“What!?” _Humiliation. Fear of judgement, especially that of General Organa. Regret._ Those emotions danced around them like skittish but hungry stray cats. Rey leaned in to Rose’s thoughts, pressing beyond the surface emotions. _I never should have let that happen. It’s all my fault._ Images she hadn’t meant to see flashed in front of her. They would be burned into her retinas for a long time. She shuddered.Then she heard a new voice in Rose’s memories, a child speaking in between sobs: _It didn’t work. I gave you what you wanted and you’re still not happy._

Rose pushed back against Rey’s incursions into those awful memories. She was nowhere near strong enough to make Rey stop, but the mental protest made Rey feel guilty. _I’m not much better than Kylo Ren. I’m sorry, Rose._ She eased out of the memories and landed back on the damp carpet of moss by the tree. “Was the child’s voice Muriel?”

Rose nodded, silently crying.

“Oh, kriff. Did she make you two…”

Another nod, and a sniffle. “I think so. We were both pretty drunk, so it was hard to tell.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“No.” _I enjoyed most of it, I shouldn’t have, I am an awful excuse for a Resistance member and a person…_

Rey hugged her and she cried into her shoulder. _Stop thinking lies that just hurt you, Rose._ “I think Snoke tried to do something like that with Kylo and I. He bridged our minds, after all. It makes sense that his sister would try to succeed where he failed. This isn’t your fault. I’ll make sure you get the levonorgestrel.”

After a while, Rose calmed down. “Alright. I’m ready to open Muriel’s Box of Doom and come back as myself. And tell you what I found after taking the birth control.”

“Okay. May the Force be with you.”

“And also with you.” Rose flushed. “Sorry. That’s the traditional response to a prayer that I was taught as a child. I just say it reflexively now, even though nobody outside of the Otomok system says that.”

“I think it works though.” Rose waved as Rey walked away, rounding the curve of the old tree and following the path out of the forest. The birds were quieter now, and golden-winged insects buzzed through the glowing mists. She felt unseen presences watching her go. _Probably the ghosts._

Once out in the field, she reached out to her body and left Rose’s mind. She waved her arms around, working out the stiffness that always set in if she meditated or explored with the Force for too long. Rose was motionless in the hospital bed, but the expression on her face seemed calmer than it was before. _I need to question Hux._ Rose said the sex was her fault and Muriel’s, but she had a tendency to blame herself for everything. Once, a pilot in a hurry knocked her down in a narrow corridor, Rose’s toolbox spilling to the floor. Rose blurted out an apology before the pilot could. If Hux was the kind of man who took advantage of a woman who had too much to drink, he would pay. She crept out of the room.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Dr. Kalonia pulled up Rose’s medical records on her datapad. Rey had disappeared to somewhere. General Hux had woken up and was being lightly tormented---no, guarded, for his own protection by Poe Dameron and Finn. Kalonia was more than happy to announce pressing duties elsewhere and leave. She would track Rey down and have another word with her after she’d checked Rose’s vitals and updated the treatment plan. The “Automatically Updated” icon was flashing by the link to Rose’s Emergency Contacts data. That was funny. The last time that happened was when Paige’s death was officially registered so she was taken off the list. Maybe this was just another system bug. She clicked on the icon. Only her years of manual dexterity training prevented the datapad from shattering on the floor.


	15. Interlude: Unfinished Business

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't leave Crazy Space Hobo alone. He has a name now.

In spite of the storm brewing in the Resistance, the day of the city progressed normally. As the sun rose higher over Canto Bight, the pfasking gods-forsaken city of sin cursed by the surrounding desert, the pavement heated up. This turned the alley behind the Chapel O’ Love to something approaching an oven. An oven that baked refuse and piss, of course.

Its resident prophet of doom rolled up the sleeves of his dying jacket and sat down in a doorway that was at least shady. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a chain with two thin pieces of metal. Only a masochist would handle metal in this heat. They burned slightly as he ran his fingers over the sunken letters and numbers. He told himself that he deserved a bit of pain from this source, especially after what just happened. It was a pair of dog tags. These were not First Order standard issue at all. They predated it. In place of a name, there was only the designation: “EO-3752”. No blood type or relevant allergies were listed. The person who owned them was unlikely to fall into the hands of those who cared about keeping them alive, after all. Offering aid to prisoners was a chivalric ideal as impractical and outmoded as fighting a duel with seconds over the reputation of some lady. On the second dog tag, there was the insignia. Nothing that would get recognized around here, today. A circle bisected by two parallel lines. Simple but distinctive.

“I hate them, you know,” EO-3752 told him on another planet so long ago when she took them off and pressed the tags into his hand, leaning over the bar table. “We’re all aware that they only put these on people that they think will die in the field. So that if they come back for retrieval later, they’ll be proven right. I don’t want to be shamed in death. I’d rather disappear. They’re a liability too. The nexu’s out among the nerfs if my current employers find these on me.” She gulped. The man (He’d been called Enri in a past life, and that is what the woman called him now) nodded assent.

“Maybe it’s a test. If you can complete the mission even with those around your neck, you will have proved yourself again. When are you ever going to tell me what you did to get sent out here in the first place?”

EO-3752 grinned. “I had too much fun. It generated an inordinate amount of datawork. After the shouting was done they decided that I could have free run of this nick off all the official records. That way everybody gets what they want, so I was told.”

“And is that working for you…” Enri struggled to recall her new official name, “Lysa ?”

Lysa sighed. “Well I’m not dead yet. I’ve been productive with outputs, transmitted lots of reports. And at least I’m enjoying the chance to do a ton of baking. I always thought that if I left The Home I would work as a cook or a baker. After all, I kept you and Veles fed for a couple of years.”

Enri chuckled. He didn’t have a beard then, and his hair was still jet-black. His mind worked properly too. Shame that he never appreciated it for what it was at the time. “It’s hard to fathom you of all people wearing an apron, rolling out biscuits, and saying things like ‘La, sir! I shall have the jam ready for this afternoon’s garden fête, and anything else you ladies and gentlemen shall require!’ You always said things like: ‘Shut up and eat, if you don’t like it you can get your own food,’ or ‘Veles, you’re on for dishes, try to actually go round the edges of the pan this time.’ Don’t you have to be nice to people here?”

She punched him in the shoulder.“I don’t sound like that. I never sounded like that. You know me. I don’t talk to people any more than I have to. And there are no posh fêtes, only ‘strategic planning reviews’. They come to the same thing in terms of tea and biscuit consumption though.”

In spite of all Lysa’s characteristic bluster, Enri was worried about her. She seemed older. Tired. He hadn’t seen her these past three years, but it bothered him. For this meeting she wore a tightly wrapped headscarf to conceal her distinctive hair, a bold sartorial choice in this town but it did hide her one real identifying feature. (Dye was prohibitively expensive out on this wet miserable rock in space.) Normally she dressed in bright colors, favoring greens and blues. Today she wore only black. “Taking Sith fashion inspiration?”, he teased.

“No, just blending in with the locals. Everyone dresses like this.”

“Oh.”

They stared at their drinks for a while. Enri had ordered what they called beer, but it was an odd opaque purple. It still had a white foam on top though. That detail made him uncomfortable. Lysa had a fruity little thing, red and probably sticky. She downed the rest of it in one swallow. “I’d better go back. I have some bread rising that I need to take care of, and need to distribute the tea.”

“The _tea,_ or just normal tea?”, he asked, referencing the slang for useful gossip or intelligence.

“Both.”

“Take care. Just comm me on the secure if you need anything, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks.”

 _And when that call came, I was worse than useless,_ he reflected in the present day. He let the chain slide through the cracks between his fingers. When the boy Armitage had stopped by, he’d meant to give the tags to him. Just to see if the designation jogged his memory at all. But that would have drawn undesired attention to himself, and he wasn’t in top form for interrogations anymore. Or sent the general on a wild nerf-chase, when he could not afford to neglect the current problems of The Lady, Ren, and that nice girl Whatsherface.

_He’s allegedly smart. He can make connections. Besides, Lysa already gave him something far more useful than this sad necklace._

The man formerly known as Enri reflected on Lysa/EO-3752. He never knew her real name. Even considering their line of work, that was unusual. Most people only used designations in official settings and went by given names among friends.

“I don’t do that,” Lysa told him once when they were twelve. “Where I’m from it’s not done to reveal your True-Name, the one you get at birth. If you do, in all the old stories you get cursed by some witch who binds you with it. You can get summoned back from the dead, and that’s bad too.”

“I thought you weren’t superstitious.”

“I’m not, but I don’t want to be proven wrong.”

And so decades later, a man who called himself a skeptic and atheist sat in an alley and counted brave, stupid ghosts with a tarnished set of dog tags like a monk praying with a rosary, muttering the names of those who had told him and the designations of those who didn’t. Enri’s people had other thoughts on names. They saw them as a source of strength.


	16. Bad Beginning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux wakes up. Content warning for crude language and implied accusation of sexual assault.  
> Honestly, whose idea was it to let Hux, Poe, and Finn be in the same room?

“You don’t have to do this, Finn.” Poe Dameron put his hand on the former stormtrooper’s shoulder as they sat in the uncomfortable plastic Medbay chairs. Hux was sleeping like the corpse they wished he was. “I know he hurt you, and it’s not going to be pretty when he wakes up.” _Besides, everyone else is probably worried about him looking for revenge. I don’t blame him, but this is the Resistance. We don’t beat people in little rooms, even when we really want to._

“I know. But I want to be here right now. I can’t let him scare me like this. I’m not FN-2187 anymore, I’m _Finn.”_

Truthfully, Hux didn’t look that threatening when he slept, stripped of his greatcoat and planet-destroying rage. He had curled into a fetal position, hair mussed. Drool trickled from the corner of his mouth and pooled on the pillow.

“I’d bet this is the most sleep he’s gotten in a year. He was always on the verge of collapse when I saw him.”

“I wonder how much of Hux is his actual personality and how much is down to chronic sleep deprivation.”

Finn shrugged. “He’d be a happy homicidal arsehole instead of an angry homicidal arsehole. It feels wrong to imagine him cheerful.”

Hux rolled over and mumbled something.

“I’m glad they let you see Hux when they brought him in, buddy. If you didn’t tell Kalonia to check his right greatcoat sleeve, we wouldn’t have done it. Thanks to you, General Hugs has no weapons now.”

Finn smiled modestly. “I thought the dagger in the wrist-sheath was just a rumor, but I wanted to be sure. Most of the rumors aren’t accurate. If you believe the trooper gossip, he was either sleeping with Ren, Phasma, or Mitaka.”

“Who’s Mitaka?”

“One of his lieutenants. In the beginning I would have put my ration chips on Mitaka if I was involved in the betting pool, but then I actually watched them interact for a few hours when they thought they were alone.They do have something, but I think they are the officer equivalent of squad-mates. And you don’t sleep with anyone from your squad. That’s gross. If you grew up and trained together, you see other people for sex.”

“So if you’re in the same trooper squad, you’re siblings?”

“Pretty much. You try not to care, but you end up loving them anyway.”

Finn stared at some point on the wall opposite them, and Poe could tell he was thinking about Slip again. He changed the subject.

“So what do you think about Hux’s dagger? Why does he have it? Where did he get it?”

“It’s likely a holdover from his school days. Assassination was a competitive sport in the Officer’s Academy. Blasters make too much noise, so stabbing became fashionable, apparently. His knife looks maintained, but well-used. As for the hilt decoration, I have no idea what that insignia is. It could be the manufacturer’s logo, or some weird Arkani religious symbol. We never used that in the First Order. All the First Order insignias look like ripoffs of the Empire designs. Two lines through a circle with no other features is too simple and different for them.”

“Hmm. So it’s custom?”

“Maybe. I’m no knife expert. If we were talking blasters, I’d be more useful.”

Hux turned over again, and kicked the mattress. He smacked his lips together a few times, and then sat up. He rubbed his eyes, blinked, and gaped at them.

“Where’s Rose?” he demanded. “Did she make it?”

 _That’s not what I was expecting him to say,_ Poe thought. _Where’s the typical: ‘We shall wipe your filth from the Galaxy’ speech?_

“Rose is being looked after.” Poe stated. “We were hoping that you could shed some light on how she got here.”

“She was unconscious and injured, so I thought I may as well act in the spirit of diplomacy and return her to where she belonged.” His gaze wandered from Finn to Poe to the floor.

“Even though you passed out from lack of food? You could have commed one of us and we would have got her. I think you know how she got like this, Hugs.”

“I forget to eat sometimes. That’s hardly a crime. And it’s _Hux._ ”

Finn spoke up. “But destroying the Hosnian System is. So is kidnapping and brainwashing children. Forgive us if we don’t trust you.”

“I understand, FN-2187.”

“It’s _Finn_.”

“How original.”

Finn didn’t rise to it. Poe was proud of him. It meant he could be the irresponsible one this time.

“So you found Rose with two fractured ankles and a broken rib, knocked out on the street somewhere. Where you just happened to be walking alone after leaving the reception. On an empty stomach. Out of the goodness of your heart, you decided to carry her back yourself. You’ve come a long way, General Hugs. You’ll be singing in a temple choir and helping old ladies cross the street next.”

“Careful, Commander Hoe Dameron. Or is it Captain these days? It’s so hard to keep track.”

Hux did get to Finn this time. “Don’t call him that!” he hissed.

“He started it. And Dameron, whatever was your communique about my mother? She was an incredible woman, one of the strongest people I’ve ever known. It’s understandable that you’d want to talk about her.”

Poe tensed up. Yes, the “your mother” comment was insensitive, but funny at the time. His own mother had died when he was a child. There was no saving face here.  
“I didn’t have one. If you didn’t start screeching and firing, it probably would have been something to the effect of: ‘Your mother’s a whore.’”

“I see. And you thought that would make me angry! She was called that before. To a very limited extent, it was true.”

They could hear the hum of Rose’s life support machinery in the next room. “But if she taught me nothing else, she taught me that the ends are more important than the means.”

Finn couldn’t take it anymore. “Just tell us what you did to Rose!”

“I didn’t do anything to Rose!” Hux screamed. “I have _standards!_ ”

“And she doesn’t meet them?” Poe asked. “Typical denial technique.”

“That’s not what I meant at all! There are things even I don’t do!”

Dr. Kalonia poked her head in the door. “Oh good, you’re awake? I’ll check your vitals and get you something to eat after I...update Rose’s treatment plans and run some more scans.” She ducked out.

“Besides,” Hux said, “We’re talking about _Rose Tico._ She’s tough. If I put my dick anywhere it wasn’t invited, she’d bite it off.” He smirked.

Finn rushed towards the bed. Poe grabbed his arms and held him back. He struggled, trying to lunge forward.

“Easy, buddy. Let’s take a break, walk around and have some late lunch. I don’t think we’ll get any more out of him. If I let you go, will you calm down?”

Finn took a deep breath and nodded. “Yeah. I shouldn’t have come here.”

“Alright. You can go take a break and I’ll comm somebody else to take my place. After they replace me, I’ll be with you.”

The medbay door slid open and Rey marched in. “Are you two done here?”

“Yes,” Poe replied. “We were just going to comm somebody to relieve us.”

“Well now you don’t need to do that. I can take over.”

Finn looked at her. “Are you sure? You seem kind of...intense right now.”

“Yes. Now go and eat something.” Poe and Finn left. The door closed.

Rey levitated one of the hard chairs over to Hux’s bedside. She sat down in it. “Ah, General Hux. I just had a few words with Rose. We have a lot to talk about. What do you remember after you left the reception?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the beginning I thought I was writing a short cracky romcom, but it got kind of dark and grew a plot.  
> Such is life.


	17. The Easy Way Isn't Working

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey and Hux have a very uncomfortable conversation. Hux realizes he banked on Rey following a moral code that she doesn't necessarily adhere to.

“Rose is conscious?” Hux asked. “Can I see her?” Seconds after the words left his mouth, he wondered why he had addressed Rey of Jakku like a medic. _She’s dangerous. She hates me. Some sucking up may be in order if I want to leave this ship un-choked. If she is as strong in the Light Side as they say she is though, she might not hurt me._

“No, she’s not back yet. She’s stable though.”

“Then how did you talk to her?” _Kriff it Hux, do you want to die?_

“I used the Force. That conversation explained a lot.” She paused. “But I want to know what _you_ intended to do last night. And what actually happened in its place.”

 _She’s using one of the oldest interrogation tricks in the book with all the subtlety of a child bluffing at sabacc,_ Hux realized. _Your buddy talked, so you’ve got nothing to lose. Only Rose isn’t my “buddy”. Her story is plausible. Rose’s Force-sensitive, and Rey is strong. But for all I know this conversation never took place. She could be dead._

Hux shrugged. “Get drunk. Try to forget about Kylo Ren’s speech. And the treaty we never should have signed. No contact with neutral planets for a standard year? No attacks on Resistance ships in neutral space for six months?What did you do to Ren to get those stipulations? And as usual, he agreed to it and signed without consulting me. I needed a distraction.”

“And Rose Tico was that distraction?”

“Rose wanted company. I provided it.” _In retrospect, I don’t think I even had that much to drink. Nor did she, although Rose is tiny. The hangover recovery period was abnormally short. But we felt and acted plastered anyway..._

“Did she really?”

Hux sighed. “She’s an adult.You’re not her older sister or mother. Get over your stupid Light Side self-righteousness, Rey. Yes, I blew up the Hosnian System. Yes, I have killed people before. I’m manipulative. I have been told that my personality is less appealing than a cold bowl of bantha-milk gruel abandoned in a nerf-herder’s hut on Tatooine. But I understand that yes means yes and no means no.”

“Odd place to draw the line, considering everything you’ve done.”

“It’s more of a personal preference than a line. If you must know, she started by trying to literally tear my clothes off. I’d like to think I would have stopped her and sent her back if I were sober. I wasn’t though.”

Rey leaned towards him. “That still doesn’t answer my question. Where did you go after the reception? How did Rose get her ankles broken?”

 _I’m not going to tell her about the Chapel O’ Love. If I just imply that we had sex, drunkenly wandered around, and got caught by Muriel she might let up. That’s too embarrassing._ “I didn’t hurt her. Snoke’s little sister has some kind of hold on Rose through the Force. I have reason to suspect that Rose is Force-sensitive now. The child Snoke-thing appeared and lifted Rose up with the Force and dropped her. Supposedly her name is Muriel. I’m not sure why Muriel ended up trying to control Rose in the first place. She wouldn’t be my first choice for a Dark Apprentice.”

Rey cracked her knuckles. Hux flinched at the sound. “Your story of Muriel matches up with what Rose told me. But I know there are things you’re not telling me. Where did you find Muriel? Why is she so invested in _you?_ You’re as Force-sensitive as a rock. It’s possible you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but something tells me there’s more. Now, we can do this the---”

Hux cut her off: “the easy way or the hard way, I know. You’ve watched too many bad holo-dramas. Rots the brain. I wonder though, Rey. What is the ‘hard way’ for you, pure little Light Side Jedi? You serve the Resistance, a weak rabble whose idea of an interrogation consists of attempting to guilt your victim into confessing. So what will it be? Will General Organa stand over me and say how disappointed she is? Loss of dessert privileges for a week?”

“I never said I was a Light Side Jedi,” Rey grinned. “Didn’t commit to it. Not sure I ever will. It seems like too much of a sacrifice, when the Dark serves me equally well. The question you should be asking yourself, Hux, is what is the hard way for a Force-user without affiliation?”

“I’ve told you everything you have any business knowing, Scavenger. I have served Kylo Ren. You don’t scare me.” Ren read his mind without his consent more times than he could count, skimming off thoughts and retrieving memories as it suited him. Snoke was worse because he made him relive his worst memories on occasion.

Rey frowned. “We tried. I gave you a chance, and you didn’t take it. Oh well. I don't want to do this, but you've left me no choice.”

 _You've left me no choice..._ Those words were a lie. Brendol said that same phrase over and over, and it usually preceded a beating. There was always a choice. Hux's mother had drummed that into his head. _Always have a backup plan. Constantly re-evaluate it, incorporate any new information you receive. Choose well when the time comes._ But nine times out of ten, people were too weak-willed to make the choice for themselves, or too ashamed to admit that they had.


	18. Stalling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey reads Hux's mind, and learns that he is quite experienced at deflecting unwanted questions.  
> Content warning for:  
> non-consensual mind reading  
> the "yub nub" song used as psychological warfare  
> A brief, non-explicit discussion of the merits of a type of tentacle porn that is exactly what it says on the tin as a method of psychological warfare  
> mentions of the death of an NPC  
> off-screen violence/abuse  
> mentions of homicide  
> Hux's Mother finally makes an appearance. She is a loving parent but a bit scary.

Rey entered Hux’s mind. It took more effort as he struggled against her, but his anger was a crack for her to slowly pry open and slip in. She found herself inside the bowels of a large dreadnought or destroyer, a maze of durasteel walls. _Get out,_ Hux hissed. _Nothing here is yours to see, Scavenger._

She ignored him. Like in Rose’s mind, she could feel the layers of his thoughts around her. But she didn’t want to hear his insulting quips about her appearance, background, and presumption to interrogate him like she was Kylo Ren. She wanted his memories from last night. She’d never done this sort of thing before. Though she would never call herself a Light Side Force-user, the fact remained that all her previous mind-reading had been conducted with its owner’s consent. She did see more than Rose wanted her to and still felt horrible about it. There was no physical representation of Hux in this metal labyrinth poorly illuminated by strip-lighting; maybe it was because he wasn’t trapped inside his own mind like Rose was caught in hers. Rose’s memories only appeared when she recalled them herself in conversation with Rey. If that was anything to go by, she would have to talk to Hux.

“What are you so ashamed of? What did Muriel do to you?” She felt a memory fading in, neon lights and stumbling through the streets of Canto Bight. Before she could get a good look at it, the memory changed.

Ewoks were dancing and singing: “Yub nub, eee chop yub nub, Ah toe mee toe pee chee keene…” Rey could tell it was an image taken from a holo.

“Why are you showing me this?”

Another memory surfaced. Hux stood at attention on the bridge of the Finalizer, and Kylo Ren clutched at his head. “Make it stop, Hux!”

“Then get out of my mind, Ren.” Hux stated calmly. He’d listened to that recording on repeat for ten minutes to get the song properly stuck in his head. It was irritating, but less of a nuisance than Kylo Ren. Ren turned on his heel and left.

“The things you do to fight Ren,” Rey mused. “If I were in your place, I don’t know how I’d bear it.”

_That is not the most extreme length anyone on this bridge has gone to for the torment of Kylo Ren._

Lieutenant Dopheld Mitaka appeared(Rey knew his name because Hux did.), and Kylo Ren towered over him, probing his mind as the smaller man resolutely filtered out columns of data in a spreadsheet, sweat trickling down the back of his neck. After a while, Ren screamed. Then sprinted for the refresher. A loud retching was audible, and continued for a while. Ren returned, face pale and gait uneven. He pointed a shaking finger at the young lieutenant.”You’re sick, Mitaka. You have a twisted mind that sinks to depths even I am not capable of. I don’t know how you sleep at night.”

Mitaka smiled, a motion that did not extend to his eyes even though everyone on the bridge knew he’d won. “Welcome to the First Order, sir.”

Ren left, whether to destroy equipment elsewhere or cry into his grandfather’s old helmet nobody knew. Or cared. Mitaka was playing a dangerous game, but at least he won this round. The other officers left for their caf break. The lieutenant stayed at his post, typing with the intensity of a musician on a doomed cruiseliner who was determined to keep playing till the end. Hux walked over to him. He learned new things about Dopheld each day, despite the years they spent together.

“What did you do to Ren, Mitaka?”

Mitaka gazed up at him, glassy-eyed. “You really want to know, Hu--Sir?”

“Yes. If possible, I would like to replicate that effect.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“Why? Please remember that you were there for half the things I did in Academy.”

“Two hours worth of Huttese-made tentacle porn, sir.” Mitaka said wretchedly. “I read somewhere that it would melt your brain if you weren’t used to that sort of thing, so I watched a feature-length documentary on the natural history of aquatic slugs beforehand to prepare myself.”

“Kriff.”

“That isn’t a problem for me anymore, sir. I’m ready to live the celibate life of a Jedi now.” Mitaka teared up. Hux pretended not to notice and filled up a glass of water at the dispenser, setting it down at the workstation.

“I can imagine Huttese porn is awful. You are a much braver man than I will ever be.” Water sloshed out of Mitaka’s glass as he lifted it to his lips, splashing his keyboard. He cursed and dabbed at it with his sleeve.

“I just want one thing on this pfassking ship that is mine alone,” Mitaka whispered. “How is that too much to ask?”

“It’s like you told Ren; Welcome to the First Order. You don’t even get to keep your mind.”

“I know. But between you and me, sir, I think Ren’s more trouble than he is worth. There’s no good way to work with Force-users like that. Ren is an overgrown child and Snoke looks like a creepy old man but seems to lack the maturity of old age.”

Hux laughed. “Shall I put in my two weeks notice? Report Ren to Human Resources? Give Snoke an engraved chronometer and host him a retirement party?”

Mitaka’s expression darkened further. “We lost Trisha on Monday.”

“Trisha?”

“Designation HR-0025. She was the last of them. I had great hopes for her. She...” Mitaka paused, and took a gasping breath. “She brought cupcakes in for my birthday. But I didn’t tell anyone it was my birthday. And the exact day isn’t on record, as you know. But she got it _right._ It was uncanny.”

“Poodoo. What a loss. That’s practically a Force ability. What happened?”

“She tried to serve Ren with an official reprimand for property destruction and orders to attend anger-management therapy. He Force-choked her and threw her down a ledge. Health and Safety has been badgering us to get railings put up for months, but I tell them it’s no use having them if Ren just throws people over them.”

“We still have Health & Safety?” Hux asked, incredulous.

“Well, all the original Health & Safety board members are dead now, but Technical Supervisor Jones and Systems Specialist Techie have stepped up in the interim.”

“Oh Force, not Jones. That woman yells at me three times a week. As if my blood pressure isn’t high enough…”

“It’s okay, sir. She recognizes that Health & Safety is a futile pursuit on a battleship with Kylo Ren. Techie just shoves plans for railings and emergency shut-off systems at me and runs away. They’re quite competent. I’m surprised because they told me he was more of an informations specialist. I haven’t the heart to tell him there’s no budget for it.”

“Who’s Techie? I haven’t heard that name before.”

“Scrawny. Long red hair. Never leaves his cubicle. Almost looks just like…” Mitaka shook his head. “We don’t bother trying to make him wear a proper uniform or cut his hair anymore. He does amazing work when he’s happy. He was a slave on some backwater planet, so we can get away with underpaying him a bit.” He drank what remained of the water, and Hux could see color returning to Mitaka’s cheeks. The rest of the crew came back from their caf break, and Hux made some excuse about datawork in his office and left.

“You’re stalling,” Rey said, now tired of being toyed with. “I don’t want to read the minutes of every budget meeting for years on end. I want to know what happened to you and Rose after you left the reception.”

The streets of Canto Bight faded back in, along with the neon sign. Rey squinted and could read it: “Canto Bight Chapel…”

Hux pulled out of the memory and the Ewok song returned. _I can see how this would drive Ren insane if it was playing every time he tried to read Hux’s mind_ Rey thought. She pushed against it. The annoying beat and nonsensical lyrics were surprisingly effective at masking other memories. There was something he was trying to drown out with it. Rey could hear it, another song faintly echoing through his mind. It grew louder. A woman was singing, in a language Rey didn’t recognize. The rhythm was steady, but there was a pause in between each verse. The melody would haunt Rey for months to come. The song swelled, and Rey could see her-- frizzy red curls lightly streaked with white, freckled skin,and dark eyes. One hand gently stroked the hair of a tiny Armitage Hux, who was tucked into a cot. The other was heavily bandaged and rested in her lap.

_There were some grammatical structures that gave me trouble, but from my rudimentary grasp of the language I figured out it was about angels guiding someone on a journey. Then I learned that angels weren’t real. When I got even older and found a translation on the holonet after months of searching, I learned it was really a long death metaphor. I shouldn’t have been surprised._

“ It’s still a beautiful song though,” Rey whispered.

“Yes, it is.”

The song ended. The woman cleared her throat. “Alright, Armie. It’s bedtime. For real.”

“But Mother, what about…” _What about the way you got hurt today? What will you do when it happens again?_

“I’m taking care of it tomorrow morning. It wasn’t your father. Don’t you worry about your old mother. It’s a good thing for us that the background murder rates around here are so high.”

Tomorrow morning she’d be down in the kitchen, making tea. With gloves and a facemask on. By afternoon, the Academy would be one officer less, but the untimely death would be blamed on one of his rivals. Not the kitchen worker whose name nobody could remember. She was tractable, forgettable and dull. Certainly not someone with knowledge of obscure, powerful neurotoxins, much less access to them.

“Goodnight, Armie. You did good work today. I’m proud of you.”

“Motherrr! You say that all the time.”

“You need to hear it. You don’t hear it nearly often enough.” _Your father never says it and he’s steadily gaining more clout with you; he should mind how he uses it,_ were the words clearly left unsaid.

“Goodnight, Mother. I love you.”

“Love you too, kiddo. Sleep tight.”

Armitage Hux lay in his narrow bed and stared at the ceiling. He couldn’t sleep. His mother was a kindly woman, who cried when the gray tabby cat (He’d named it Tarkin) brought in dead birds or when she heard news of cadets killed in action. But when needed, she was just as efficient and remorseless as the cat. Slowly but deliberately, she was teaching Armitage her methods. By the time he was eight he could throw knives more precisely than a stormtrooper could shoot.(“That’s a low standard”, his mother told him when he hit the target for the tenth time in a row. “You’re eight years old though. This is phenomenal.”) Brendol knew nothing of this, and it was all Armitage could do to hold his tongue while his father ranted about how his mother was wasting the Commandant’s son’s time with cooking lessons. A different boy with a different mother might have snapped, but before he was allowed to learn knives his mother made sure he understood the importance of silence.

His memories shifted. It was late one night, and he was a couple of years older. His mother ran her dagger under a steady stream of water in the special sink, then wiped it off with a piece of cloth. The white fabric came away red, and she frowned and repeated the cycle of rinsing and wiping. Satisfied, she replaced it in the wrist-sheath, and dropped the fabric in the incinerator.

“How do you do it without feeling bad, Mother? I mean, they were people.”

Hux’s mother hung up her coat on the peg by the door. “I remember what they’ve done. At this point, they’re not really human anymore. They’re rabid dogs that need to be put down before they bite somebody.”

Hux’s memories shifted forward: “You wonder why I keep a rabid cur in such a place of power…” said Snoke, and he flinched, dwarfed by this tasteless,wrinkled being of pure evil. _Force only knows what Mother would say if she could see me now..._

“Show me the events of last night,” ordered Rey. Her commands and nudges had no effect. She was barely keeping afloat in Hux’s sea of memories. Images and words bled together, flashing. She felt pain from hands, fists, a belt. Fear. Rage. Humiliation. _I have to finish what Mother started. Clean up this filthy, disordered collection of delusional old Imperials that has the audacity to call itself the First Order._

_Seen enough, Scavenger?_

“I didn’t need to see this, Hux. I’m sorry though. Your father was a sadist.”

_I don’t need your pity._

“I never offered it. Finn suffered as much as you, and I don’t see him blowing up star systems.”

 _Don’t compare me to that traitor!_ Another memory bubbled up; young Hux and his mother in the dimly lit kitchen once again. His mother sat in front of a receiver set up on a counter. One of her eyes was masked by a puffy purple bruise. She attached headphones to it and adjusted the dials.

“Want to listen, Armie?”

“Yes. Will you tell me what the color codes signify this time?”

“Nope. Tomorrow, tell me what _you_ think they mean. ”

They sat on a rickety old chair, squeezed together between the pair of headphones. Hux was perched on his mother's lap. The broadcast began: “Listeners, Attention! Broadcast begins.” A bell rang. “Fifty-four. Sixty-eight. Twenty-three. One hundred and thirty-two. _Clang._ ” Another bell rang, this one deeper in tone. “Green. Forty-one.” An old song played after this. Hux’s mother told him later that it was by a band called the Modal Nodes. More numbers and color designations were announced. Hux’s mother frantically scribbled notes in a crabbed hand on a flimsy. She would burn that too, when the broadcast finished. After half an hour, the recitation drew to a close. “Those who received the highest honor since last broadcast were EOs designated 24601, 3754, and 8095.To those of you serving, thank you. May the Force be with you. Broadcast ends.” Hux's mother dug her fingernails into her palms when the "honored" designations were announced.

"Are they dead, Mother?" Armie had to ask.

"No. Worse than that." After hiding the receiver in a cabinet behind the kitchen appliances that looked like torture devices even though Armie had seen them in action doing things as innocuous as balling melons or de-coring fruits, his mother pulled out three emergency candles and lit them. "Go to bed, Armie."

He did. It took him hours to fall asleep, and he dreamed of his mother dissolving into a string of numbers while singing about angels. After she got through the last verse of the song, all the numbers burst into flame.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I gave my Hux mommy issues too.  
> Updates will be sporadic soon. For the next couple of months, I will be stuck firmly in Real Life.  
> I have three possible (but still kind of vague) endings planned: a mostly-happy ending, a mostly-sad ending, and a pure crack ending. I have to see what tone this piece ends up taking, because it really could go any of these ways right now.


	19. Mind & Soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose opens That Box.  
> Content warning for brief suicidal ideation and non-sexual partial nudity.  
> If you get the quotes I shamelessly used here, Technical Supervisor Jones will give you a muffin.  
> I am sorry for everything I have/will put Rose through in this story.  
> She'll be happy enough in the end though. Probably.

The fire caused by Muriel's delivery was properly out; not even a solitary ember smoldered on the damp ground. Rose crept towards the soot-stained box. She flung the lid up, and it banged open. The sun was rising over the treetops, and golden light filtered down to the forest floor. _That’s new._ The walls of the container came up to her waist. Bending over it, she looked in. At the bottom of the box lay a stone knife, with a bone handle attached to the blade with a tightly wound strip of hide. The blade was delicately knapped-- she knew without touching that it was nearly as sharp as anything made from metal. She knew for years what it would be used for. On a Grade Six school trip to the history museum (before that was bombed), she’d seen a knife just like this one in a glass display case, placed beside an Otorini Cedar seed and a set of rope ties. Her knees went weak, the already overheated room crowded with warm bodies burned, and her head spun. She grabbed the railing in front of the case and tried not to fall down. The other children pointed and whispered. Miss Solis said something to the other chaperone, then took Rose in her arms and led her to a bench on the other side of the gallery. She was dimly aware of being given a cup of water to drink, and of a wet paper towel pressed against her forehead.

“Do you need to go back home? You don’t look well. I can call your Auntie and ask her to come get you.”

Rose shook her head. “She’s working. She can’t get off early. I’ll be fine.”

Miss Solis frowned. “Alright. I could get Radda’s mother to take you back to school and you could go to the nurse’s office. She came here from work in her own speeder. We have more chaperones than we really need most of the time in case something like this happens. Would you like that?”

“Thank you but no. I can’t--I can’t break down like this. I’m not sick. It will pass.”

“Did something frighten you?”

“It was the Forest exhibit. The ‘historical ritual part’.”

“Oh. That bothers me every time too.”

Eagerly, Rose yanked up the chain of her pendent and let it dangle outside her shirt. “Did you…?”

“No. Please put that away. I never went to the Forest. I would rather not see visions of the future.” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and looked away for a moment. “ My older brother was chosen. Very strongly. I never met him. He was thirteen years older than I and went away before I was born. We lived out in the country, right next to the Forest. It was a long time ago--medicine hadn’t progressed that far and the only medical help they had out there was the District Nurse. They certainly had no access to the drugs they have nowdays or an isolation chamber, and nobody back then understood how to handle such a powerful episode. If he was born in your generation instead, I’m sure things would have been different. He lost a lot of functionality. Accidents happened and eventually he went off-planet to some institution. They never heard from him again.”

The implications of that situation made Rose shiver. She couldn’t imagine facing her visions while the whole world screamed at her. “And I thought the isolation period was bad.”

“I’m sorry I said that, Rose. That was not a comforting thing to tell you, not to mention unprofessional.”

“It’s okay, Miss Solis. I mean, it’s making me feel better. Things could have been worse.” Her throat constricted. “What really set me off was that it felt wrong to have those things behind glass, just sitting there. It reminded me that...at the time, I wanted it to happen. I wanted to join the Forest. It hurt not to. I’m happy to be alive though.” She stood up, her legs feeling stable once again. “I’m ready to go back.”

Miss Solis skeptically pursed her lips, looking over the rim of her glasses. “Why don’t you go with the other class? They’ve already seen the Forest exhibit and they’re working their way over to the Structural Engineering mines interactive.”

“We’ve already seen that.”

“You can see it again if you want to. I’ll make up something about equalizing group numbers if anybody asks and we all meet up as a grade for lunch and the bus anyway.”

“Thank you. I’d like that.”

So she got to do the structural sims again and publicly beat that prat Yelin’s high score. The Holo-simmed mine she worked on did not collapse, nor did it flood when the “water” around it rose to the highest levels. There were Toim-berry muffins in her lunch bag, crunchy-seeded bitter green berries waging a heavenly war with sweet fluffy pastry. Life was wonderful again.

Back in the present, the box gaped at her. There was no going into the next gallery here. No kind teacher to give her a glass of water and a way out. Willing herself to steady her shaking hands, she picked up the knife and looked again. An Otorini Cedar seed rolled away from her. She grabbed that too, and looked for what she expected but did not want to see. _No rope. No stakes. Good._

The outer hull of the seed was blackened with smoke, but it appeared unharmed. She’d read somewhere that they would germinate even if exposed to fire. She clenched it in her left fist, reveling in the warmth and the rough shell against her hand. But the knife blade glittered dangerously in her right hand. _What’s the point, Muriel? Do you want me to make myself into a Soul-Tree? That’s just not done. I can’t do that on my own._ After checking to see that the box was truly empty, she retreated back to the old behemoth of a tree to think. She tried setting the items down and focusing on a return to her body, but her efforts were fruitless. She was well and truly trapped here.

“What am I supposed to do?”

She felt a ripple around her as Muriel entered her mind again. “What you’ve always wanted to do. Grow a new Soul-Tree.”

Rose’s hands trembled. She tossed the knife as far away from herself as she could. “I’ve thought about it many times, Muriel. The answer is always no, not today. Maybe I’m not the best person to have survived Hays Minor, but I did and that means something. Auntie Carissa, Auntie Vi, Janica, Paige and everyone didn’t die so I could throw my life away.” Her cheeks were starting to get wet. “Yes, I’m scared of a lot of things. Scared to live in this crazy Galaxy. Convinced half the time that I’m letting down my family that died trying to do the right thing. Afraid that I don’t measure up, that I’m just a clumsy, barely literate and scarcely competent tech who’s more trouble than she’s worth. I’m fixing fighters and rewiring calcinators on battleships in space when I dreamed about creating things that would keep people safe or heal my planet. I tell myself I’m a failure sometimes. When things get really bad, I think that everyone around me is waiting for me to realize I’m not wanted and disappear. And then I tell myself I’m being neurotic, maybe I have an anxiety disorder or depression on top of everything else.” She paused and stroked the soft bark of the kind old tree that held her up. Well, representation of a tree, but it was enough for now. “I’m afraid. I’ll probably stay afraid. But I’m doing it anyway!”

“No, Rose, you don’t get it! If we do it right, you’ll survive, more powerful than ever before! I figured out a way to make a stronger bond between us. If you consent to putting part of your soul in me, we’ll be able to talk all the time and I can transfer my abilities to you. It wouldn’t be control though. Because it goes both ways. I’d be able to suggest things to you, and you could tell me things too.”

Rose sighed. _Why can’t I see Muriel when she is communicating with me like this? I saw a representation of Rey last time._

“It’s because I’m bonded with you, but you’re not bonded with Rey. In a sense, I live here part-time. It’s like having a vacation home on Naboo.”

“My mind is not your property!”

“It’s a nice place.”

“And why would I ever want to open up a limitless channel of communication with you? You made me sleep with a man I was admittedly physically attracted to but hated. I have reason to suspect you manipulated him as well. You made me sabotage a Resistance mission. Now thanks to your meddling, I’m trapped in my own mind and as good as dead.” Silence, except for the birds and a slight wind in the trees. She cupped her hands and tilted them so the round seed rolled from one to palm to the other.

She could hear faint sobs. “You want to do that because this way, if you get killed I die too. I think I love you.”

Rose reeled from the shock of that statement. In her youth she had received a proposition from a friend out of the blue, and spent the next forty-eight hours writing a script to let her down gently. It wasn’t that she found her unattractive, it was just that she thought their dispositions were better suited to friendship than courting. There was no luxury of a datapad, her older sister’s advice, or time now. Muriel was obviously too young to want Rose in a sexual way, but she seemed capable of forming romantic or platonic attachments.

“That’s...that’s not a healthy way to live, Muriel. I’m a little concerned right now. You should have a lot of things to live for.”

Muriel snapped. “No, it’s not because I’m infatuated with you, idiot! My parents found out about the bond we already have. It won’t break unless one of us dies. They want me to kill you, go away for an apprenticeship, and bind to someone stronger when my powers have fully developed. Someone like Rey.”

Rose’s heart sank.

“I told them that it would be near-impossible to bind to Rey because she’s older. That Snoke only had such good control over Kylo for so long because he started when the boy was young. They didn’t listen.”

“You don’t want to kill me?”

“No. I’ve never killed anyone before. You’re my friend and I don’t want to hurt you. I broke someone once. Snoke told me to do it, told me that he had betrayed us and that just killing him would make him a martyr for his friends. So I made some parts of his mind not work anymore. I got rid of some of his most influential memories, and I totally kriffed up his impulse control and self-regulation. He was proud of those parts of himself, so that was the best way to do it. I think he’s a beggar these days. Snoke said I did a good job.”

“I’m not too keen on a bond with you, hearing that.”

“I told you, we already have a bond! If we strengthened it, I would be physically incapable of doing that to you. It would hit me too. I never want to do anything like that again. That man is pretty much useless now. But he still suffers. He knows there are bits of him that aren’t working and he doesn’t know what they are.”

“How long ago did you do that?”

“Fairly recently. About twenty years ago, give or take.”

“Ah.”

Rose sat on a rock, still toying with the seed. “Where does the Soul-Tree come into it? Or killing Kylo Ren?”

“That takes us down this path that I don’t completely understand, but I’d like to learn more about. See, Otorini cedars got called “Soul-Trees” because nearly every cell in them is capable of absorbing the Force. If a Force-user dies over a seed that is just starting to germinate, the energy field of the individual person transfers directly to the seed, and jump-starts the growth process a little. That gets into some biology that I haven’t yet got to in school, and some mystical stuff that’s beyond me right now too. But your mind is incredible. You have a representation of this forest of trees that absorb and transfer the Force all in your head. If you found a way to use it, you could drain Kylo Ren of the Force.”

“That’s not how the Forest works,” said Rose. “That’s not even how logic works. The trees took up the spirits and energy of the people because they willingly surrendered them. And died.”

“You’re not seeing the bigger picture, Rose. Have you ever wondered why your people didn’t form ranks like the Jedi did? Why they didn’t jump into ships and travel the Galaxy, laser swords swinging? It’s not just because of the culture. It’s because the Forest awakened Force-sensitivity in individual people all at once, but it drained power from them at the same time. Even the strongest Listener, as I think it was called, was limited by their connection to the Forest because the trees would latently suck it from them. This was true even in areas where the Otorini Cedar didn’t grow. There were no Kukiri Jedi either. It was a forest hungry enough to keep an entire planet’s raw Force power at low to intermediate levels. That ties into the fact that the most powerful Jedi ever to live all came from desert planets. For Rey, Luke, and Anakin, the power concentrated in them and wasn’t drawn away by a bunch of other life forms. Yes,desert ecosystems can be interesting, but they’re mostly acres of empty sand on Tatooine and Jakku. There’s so much we don’t know because--”

“It’s gone,” Rose cut in.

“Well, there’s an old saying that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken. A place like the Forest isn’t truly dead if you remember it.”

“Pointless optimism”, Rose scoffed. _Oh no, I’ve only been with Hux for a night and he is rubbing off on me._ “So to condense all that, you want me to simulate the Soul-Tree creation ritual here, and that will somehow bridge our minds like what Snoke did with Kylo and Rey but more so. Magically, this will make me into a ysalamiri. Kylo won’t be able to use his powers while Hux tries to kill him.”

“Close but not quite. Ysalamiri create Force-neutralizing bubbles, while you would be absorbing Kylo’s powers.”

“How do I do that?”

“I don’t know yet. I watched Rey read your mind, and it tired her out. It was more than the background effort required to do that. You were trying to let her in. It shouldn’t have made her that fatigued. When I watched, I could feel her power draining. I got you married to Hux so you could be happy and do married-people things with him, but also so he would take you back to the _Finalizer._ There, you could experiment and practice draining Ren’s powers. Discreetly.”

Rose groaned. “This is a worse plan than going to Canto Bight with Finn. He’ll notice, and we’ll all die.”

“If it comes to that, I can share my Force-use powers and control you remotely. I know how to Force-choke and throw people around. Kylo can’t use a lightsaber if he’s being choked. That’s hard to do though. It involves a tight bond and lots of trust. And if you don’t agree, my parents are literally going to make me kill you. While I’m locked in my room. There’s this thing I’ve been learning how to do where you make the brain shut everything off…”

“I get it.”

“Yay! So we’re doing this.”

Rose groped around in the underbrush and retrieved the stone knife. “It doesn’t look like I have a lot of choice. I can’t do the knife work myself, I’ll have you know.”

“Don’t worry about that. Just get the seed ready, take off your shirt, and lie down.”

Rose stripped off her shirt. _If this is all in my head, how am I wearing clothes?_ , she wondered.

“You always imagine yourself wearing clothes.”

“Stop doing that.”

“Sorry. This is what it’s like when I’m at home. Unless we do shielding, we can read each other’s surface thoughts.”

She left her necklace on, tracing the pattern with her fingertips. It felt important to keep it. Poking under a bush produced a stout stick. Items in hand, she found a sunny spot that was bare but for a patch of moss. Kneeling in terror Rose Tico, the last completely lucid Listener of Hays Minor stabbed the stick into the rich black humus and began to dig.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rose uses a slightly paraphrased Carrie Fisher quote in the end of her speech on fear, and Muriel has absorbed Terry Pratchett's wisdom on immortality and death despite her young age.


	20. It's Done

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kalonia is even more confused now.  
> Content warning for brief temporary character death, mild gore, and non-sexual nudity.  
> Discussion of mental health issues, but nothing there goes beyond the logical emotional/psychological fallout from all the trauma everyone has canonically experienced.

Harter Kalonia didn’t have too long to speculate on why in the Galaxy Rose’s Emergency Contacts list included General Armitage pfassking Hux. Within a minute, Rose’s cardio monitor flatlined and everything beeped at once. She started the compressions immediately, but to no avail. Desperation growing, she gave the patient electric shocks with a defibrillator. _Why the kriff is she going into cardiac arrest now?_ In a last-ditch effort, she put in an IV line of epinephrine. Technically all the major cardiology journals didn’t endorse that now because of a possible link to brain damage, but if she did nothing Rose Tico would die anyway. One of the older med-droids scanned over her patient’s body with excruciating slowness, its white plastic joints creaking. “We don’t know why, but we’re losing her,” it said. “She’s lost the will to live.”

 _That piece of junk gave the same prognosis for a patient with a sprained ankle,_ she recalled. _We really ought to decommission it._ Rose was a regular presence in the medbay when she was well, tuning up the droids and helping Kalonia run safety checks on the machinery. Now she was dying. She switched the defective med-droid off. _That thing has probably been used since the Clone Wars._ There was nothing she could do now. _She’s lost the will to live._

Months ago, Rey had nervously stood outside of her open office door. “Come in, Rey!”, she called. “I’m just doing datawork right now. It’s a good time to chat. How is the new high-protein diet treating you?”

Rey slunk in and sat down at the chair in front of her desk. “Can I close the door?” Kalonia nodded. Rey waved a hand and the door slid shut. “The new diet’s fine. I’ve set alarms on my datapad so I actually go to meals on time. Rose sits with me and threatens to cram it all down my throat if I don’t eat. She won’t let me put anything in my pockets either and reminds me about my ration bar stash. I’m grateful I have someone to keep me accountable.”

“Good. Now we won’t see any real effects for a few months, even accounting for the new supplements…” Kalonia was happy that Rey understood the need to wean herself off her scavenger habit of eating the bare minimum once a day and hoarding the rest. She was deficient in well, practically everything when Han Solo brought her in. The girl needed to get stronger.

“I’m not here for myself, Doctor. I’m worried about Rose.”

“What about her?”

“It’s her mental health. I know you’re not a psychiatrist, but you’ve got more qualifications than I have for that sort of thing. I can read minds. But I can’t process what any of those emotions I see mean. I don’t know how to deal with them. I’m seriously concerned about Rose’s self-esteem. She thinks she should have died and her sister should have lived.”

Kalonia sighed. “There’s no magical cure for survivor’s guilt or grieving. These things take time. Does she acknowledge her feelings or talk about them with you?”

“Yes. I told her they were a natural part of grief. I saw that somewhere on the holonet. She still felt uncomfortable with them though. She asked me to read her mind. I did.”

_Doesn’t she know how dangerous that could have been? When Poe came back after the whole Jakku fiasco, something in him broke. He had nightmares. Didn’t laugh and smile in quite the same way anymore. I gave him anti-anxiety meds and listened. When he’d tell me anything. Half the time he’d crack jokes and pretend it was fine. I have no idea if I helped at all. Then I told Leia what Kylo did to him and they holed up in her office for hours that afternoon, staggered out red-eyed in each other’s arms but still feeling better. Poe needed to talk to someone who had been through that before. I should have seen it in the beginning. Now Rey’s playing with Rose like mind-reading is a simple party trick._

“That could have gone horribly wrong. You could have caused damage…”

“But I didn’t, Doctor. I didn’t force my way in. She asked me to. Now I want to know what I can do to help her get better. She used to be so happy when Paige was alive. Paige was always flying on missions or training so I didn't get to know her, but I’d see Rose around fixing things and we’d talk mechanics. Even without reading her mind, I could feel joy radiating from her. That’s gone now.”

 _I’m a surgeon and general practitioner, not a therapist. I have some psychiatry training though. Let’s hope it’s enough._ “At least Rose has a friend like you looking out for her. That’s a start. It’s a good sign that she is keeping you honest with your new regimen and going to meals with you. Oftentimes, people with survivor’s guilt feel better when they help others. I would tell her that you appreciate it. Has Finn or Poe noticed anything? You don’t have to do this on your own, nor should you.”

“Yes. I’ve talked with Finn. Finn has told Poe. We’ve decided collectively that Rose isn’t allowed to be alone on weekends anymore. We stay with her in shifts and have holo-drama or board game nights every Saturday, if we can swing it with all of our schedules.”

“That’s a good strategy.”

“I should be doing more. I just have this nagging feeling that there’s something I’ve missed with her, something big, and I don’t know what it is.”

Kalonia opened the appointment scheduling application on her datapad. “Let’s try to get her in here for a chat. I’m no therapist, but I’ll see what I can do.”

Rey smiled. “You keep saying you’re not a therapist, but I feel better every time I talk to you. If it weren’t for you, I’d still be wondering if my asexuality was part of my abandonment issues or a weird manifestation of Jedi abilities or something. I feel better knowing there’s a word for it and that there are normal people like me too.”

“Normal is a relative term. I’m glad you brought this up. Now that I think about it, we could organize a Resistance grief support group. Everyone’s lost someone here, but nobody talks about it.”

“That sounds like a great idea.” There was never time to formally create that support group. Months later, the Resistance shrank so drastically that it was a de facto grief support group.

Harter Kalonia did talk to Rose. Like every time she was forced to act as a therapist, she questioned her efficacy.

“I UNDERSTAND that my emotions are normal!” Rose burst out, a soggy tissue clenched in her fist. “I’m going through like the Seven Stages of Grief, Five Stages, whatever. Denial, bargaining, anger… I’m nothing special there. I don’t care about being damaged or anything. I only want my feelings gone.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t take them away from you. I can only listen and suggest methods for managing them.”

“I shouldn’t feel this many kriffing emotions so strongly. Everyone I know has had worse. Finn was kidnapped, brainwashed, and his best friend died in his arms. Poe had his mind ripped open by Kylo Ren. Rey never had anyone who cared about her until now and doesn’t know how to process all of that yet. My childhood was fine. We didn’t go hungry often. I had Aunties. I had a sister. I had friends, a boyfriend and a girlfriend even. I loved all of them.”

Kalonia passed Rose the box of tissues.

“Thanks.” She blew her nose loudly.

“You’re welcome. I think you need to give yourself permission to grieve. You had a network of people who meant a lot to you in your life, and then you lost them. Of course it hurts.”

“I know, Doctor. It’s just that Rey, Finn, and Poe seem so…normal and in control. I wish I could be more like them.”

Harter Kalonia sighed. “Most people work hard on external appearances.” _I can’t tell her that Finn is exhibiting classic symptoms of PTSD, and it hurts him just to hold a blaster. He keeps on training anyway. Or how Poe told me that he’s a little scared of Rey, even though he knows she would never hurt him. And Rey…Rey has been rejected too many times in her short life. She forms attachments when she finds them and holds on tight. She admitted that she thought of Finn, Poe, and Rose as hers even though she knows that’s not entirely healthy._ “Those don’t always match up to reality.”

The girl nodded. _She’s in her twenties, legally an adult now. But I can’t help but think of all of them as kids._ “I think I know what you mean. That helps. I guess. So what you’re saying is that we’re all kriffed up here and what matters is how we manage it. It’s pointless to compare ourselves to others because they all have their own thing going on and only they know exactly what it is.”

“Exactly. That’s an insightful analysis.”

“Alright. From now on I’m only going to compete with myself in the all-Resistance Sanity and Mental Health Trials. I’m sad because everyone from my childhood is dead, but when that passes I’m going to be stupidly happy. I have my health. I have friends. I’ve got a purpose here; I can fix things so we can keep the Galaxy safe from the First Order. I’m alive and Force willing I will stay that way!”

Now that same young woman who shone with the determination to conquer her own demons and the First Order lay dead in the medbay, only a few steps down the hall from the office where she made those declarations.

Rose’s body was warm even in death. In a fit of curiosity, she checked her temperature. Steady 98.6. It began to slowly increase. 100, 105?! Why was the patient experiencing a fever when her heart no longer beat and by all reasonable standards she was dead? Then, her chest opened with a sickening pop in an explosion of blood. Kalonia could see Rose’s heart. For some reason it began to beat once more, gently pulsing and glistening under the overhead light. _Why? How?_ She thought she’d seen everything in her years as a military doctor. If this were a holodrama and Kalonia did not have such extensive medical training, she would have ran away screaming. Instead, that part of her went off into a metaphorical corner to cry by itself. _Alright, this is a major chest cavity wound. Her heart is beating and despite the massive blood loss she is still alive. The next order of business is to get this mess sutured up and give her a transfusion. Quickly._

She donned a new pair of gloves and prepped the surgical droids in record time. Just as she got the first suture needle hooked into the edge of the wound, purple tendrils of lightning crackled through Rose’s body, sparking against Kalonia’s fingers. She recoiled and backed away. The lightning stopped crackling and oozed into the hole in Rose’s chest. Skin and muscles knit back together. Rose gasped. Her eyes opened, and for an instant they were no longer their usual dark brown but an unfamiliar icy blue. She blinked and they changed back. The lightning disappeared as suddenly as it sparked up. Rose lost consciousness again, chest falling and rising in a steady rhythm. Were it not for the blood spatters painting the medbay walls and Kalonia’s scrubs or the new scars on Rose’s chest, the doctor would have dismissed this episode as a hallucination. With the patient stable once more (Kalonia wasn’t so sure about her own stability), she could focus on her surroundings. _Get the blood cleaned up. Scan her brain again. Examine the ankles; they look completely healed and I don’t know why. Investigate the shouting next door. Look for Rey. I shouldn’t have left Finn and Poe in with Hux…_

Rose’s eyes opened again. Kalonia peered into them. They were brown. _I am so chronically sleep-deprived I see things._ The girl thrashed around and extricated herself from the bacta suit, pulling out her IV line. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up.

“Rose Tico, what the kriff happened to you? I don’t think you’re in any condition to walk!” Bedside manner was forgotten in the frustration of mysteries unknown to medical science.

Rose sprinted nude from her room in the medbay, barreling down the hall in the direction of the raised voices. "Sorry! I have to see Rey!", she called over her shoulder. Kalonia had no choice but to chase after her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay, I worked out more plot! Don't worry; I have some quality (I hope) Hux/Rose content coming up. Soon, they will be forced to spend a lot of time together. Mitaka & Clan Techie will get some moments too. I didn't change the tags to multi for them because their relationship will move at a glacial pace and is mostly background.  
> For those of you wondering about my use of Dredd & SNL crossovers:  
> Matt the Radar Technician is Kylo Ren.  
> Clan Techie here is loosely based off the character from Dredd, but in some AU where the First Order invades his planet at a time when they really needed competent IT help. He is not related at all to Hux; the ginger hair and similar features are purely coincidental.  
> Technical Supervisor Jones is based off of Leslie Jones' character in the SNL sketch. She is not meant to represent the real comedian Leslie Jones; she was unnamed in the sketch and I was too lazy to name her.


	21. Breaking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux snaps. Rey tries to understand the events of last night. And more people are steadily gaining more information.  
> Content warning for:  
> brief, implicit discussion of dubcon and possible abortion  
> character death, relatively minor in the scheme of this work but very major for one person in particular.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Chapter 19, I recently corrected part of Rose's discussion with her teacher. The teacher's older brother had the bad experience in the Forest, not her uncle. I am terrible at math and then when I sat down and did some I realized that if it were her uncle it would ruin my planned timeline.

Hux was ten years old and sprinting down a corridor on the heels of his mother, her curls bouncing. “Why are we running?” He wheezed and leaned against a wall for a second.

“Hux, we’ve established that I don’t care about your childhood!” Rey tried to make Hux exit this memory, even humming a few bars of the Yub Nub song.

_Believe me, I want to stop thinking about this too, Hux replied. But I can’t, Scavenger. Your intrusions into my mind have uncovered things better left buried. Now I can’t get out._

The memories flowed on.

“Because if we don’t take that batch of bread out of the oven soon it will burn!” Hux’s mother called, bootheels clicking on the tiles of the floor. “The chronometer’s malfunctioning so I thought it was in there ten minutes later than it actually was. It would be a waste and the sprinklers always go off with the smoke alarm. Can’t have a mess in there.”

That explanation was dubious, but it was all he would get for now. They rounded the corner and dashed into the sanctuary of the kitchen. His mother locked the door behind them. Armie breathed in the familiar scents of baking bread, fruit-scented detergent, and potted herbs on the windowsill. He turned on the light in the main oven and checked the loaves of bread. They were coming along nicely, but ought to stay in for ten minutes more at least to get properly golden brown. “What’s happening, Mother?”

She held up one finger for silence and rummaged through the seldom-used small appliances in what her son named the Obscure Cabinet of Ouch (abbreviated to OCO). This storage space earned its name after an ill-fated attempt to fetch an immersion blender in dim lighting. They kept the receiver and a pair of headphones there too, but today she took everything out and removed the back panel. Fumbling in the dark, she retrieved a commlink. After putting the OCO back in order, she put in the earpiece, turned it on, and listened.

Hux always had trouble reading his mother’s face. She was a competent actress who would perform unflattering impressions of the Academy staff currently out of her favor in private. They were hilarious because they were often brutally accurate. But after a short lifetime in her care, he knew that the graver the situation, the blanker her expression would become. As the call length dragged on, she nodded and gradually resembled a department-store mannequin, eyes still and mouth a horizontal line.

“So you’re telling me that I cannot speak to EO-3974 at this time, that he is not currently in your database. His given name is Enri Solis. Will that help?”

She frowned. “E-N-R-I, S-O-L-I-S. No? Alright, this is fine.”

His mother’s nerves were catching. Armie kept looking behind him, half-expecting Brendol to burst in through the door, blaster drawn. _He never comes in here. Stop thinking like that._

“Mhm. Of course. Understood. Yes, I will be ready for extrication then. With my son.”

Dead silence for a couple of minutes.

“No, I’m not leaving without him. What kind of mother do you think I am?”

Another pause. Her façade cracked. Armie thought she might cry for a minute, but she reined in her emotions and drove them into steely anger.

“Look, you’re sending a squad for a grown woman, a graduate from the Institute. Who got First Distinction, I may add. What makes you think a barely-trained _child_ might be safe here? Especially one whose father was always suspicious of me but never had anything to corroborate those feelings?”

Her cheeks flushed. “We can pick him up later?! I wouldn’t trust his father with a houseplant for a week, much less my son.”

She gritted her teeth. “Yes, you should have known for the last ten years. I was operating under the assumption that my esteemed superiors actually _read_ submitted Incident Report forms. This armpit of a planet has next to no affordable or practical women’s home health products that can be discreetly obtained. I learned this regrettable fact after I acted to preserve the integrity of my current persona. We really ought to put out a list of special warnings for Arkanis. Enough rain to drown a fish, unfriendly locals, and reproductive health concepts developed three hundred years ago decried as too new and risky.”

She breathed in and out, knuckles white as she gripped the comm.

“I don’t care. I’m leaving with the boy or not at all. I can take my chances and find other employment. He needs me. Besides, he’s a bright lad. I’m not saying that because I’m his mother. If he were slow I’d just say he was nice. He’s quite good with knives. I think he would do well at the Institute.”

The plastic of the comm unit creaked in her grip. “Well, may the Bloody Mother’s face shine upon you too.” She ended the call and let the unit fall to the counter with a thud.

“Mother, what…” He’d heard enough stories about the Bloody Mother to know that you did not want to see her face. Or want her to watch you. She was a Mother Goddess, but one focused on blood, pain, and rage instead of fertility and nurturing. Patron of war. Her twin the Blessed Mother had a rather larger following. He had no clue about the gods until he asked.

The memories changed to a different morning in the kitchen years earlier. The gutters overflowed and gurgled in a counterpart to the endless drumroll of rain on the roof. Hux’s mother was deadheading the spent pink flowers of a potted plant with broad leaves. She wore her thickest rubber gloves and had spread layers of paper over the table before starting out. Armie watched in fascination.

“That’s Angel’s Trumpet, Armie. A common ornamental plant in some parts. People think it gets the name from the tubular flowers. It doesn’t. An extract from the leaves is odorless, tasteless, and colorless. It’s not useless though. One milligram in any food or drink will send your mark to the Angels a day or more after ingestion, with no visible symptoms prior to death. Can you tell me why that’s useful?”

He glowed. This was an easy question, but he was happy he knew it. “It will be difficult for any investigators to pinpoint the cause of death, or the killer. If the mark died immediately after eating the poisoned food, the method of delivery and killer might be more obvious. The longer the gap between administration of poison and death, the better to reduce the chance of accurate suspicions.”

“Correct.”

“Why do you say: ‘send to the Angels?’ I know they’re supposedly these pretty things that fly, but what do they _do?_ ”

“They serve the gods and help the souls of people who die enter the afterlife. I don’t know if they really exist, but I try to honor the angels and worship the gods anyway.”

“What gods?”

“I suppose I should properly tell you about them.” She took off her gloves and unlocked a small cabinet. It contained a slim book, some paperweights and pens, and two pictures were pasted to the back side by side. One showed a broad-hipped woman, nude and drenched in blood. In her right hand she raised a sword. Her features were frozen in a snarl, tears washing tracks in the blood coating her face. The other showed a skinny girl with a kind smile and golden hands. “That’s Irmata Goldenhands and the Bloody Mother. I used to only worship Irmata when I was younger. Now I devote myself to the Bloody Mother too. There are more gods in the pantheon, guardians of prosperity and agriculture and such, but these are the only ones I really bother with.”

“Why are Irmata’s hands golden?” Armie asked. He didn’t think his mother believed in anyone but herself until now.

“It’s in her story.” She pulled out the little book and flipped to a page. He couldn’t read any of the words, but the colorful pictures with their intricate designs intrigued him. The first one showed a thin waif surrounded by other ragged children. “Before she became a goddess, Irmata was a thief. A very good one. She could make people forget they saw her, pick any lock, and sprint like the wind. It was said she lifted a gemstone necklace off a king’s neck in broad daylight, from the other side of the square from his throne. She only stole because she was poor, to feed herself and others. Irmata kept only what she needed for herself and gave the rest away. But one day she was caught. The punishment for theft in those days was having both hands cut off with an ax.” She turned the page, and the same girl’s mouth was open in a silent scream as blood flowed from the stumps where her hands used to be. “Now, they didn’t bind off her stumps or cauterize them. The justices of the town meant for her to die. But she didn’t. The bleeding stopped and she healed. And then Irmata discovered a wonderful thing; she could still steal without hands. It was rough but she kept going until she had enough money to get herself robotic replacements and had them plated in gold.”

“What did she do then?”

“She carried on stealing to feed the poor. Later she trained apprentices. One morning when she was very old, an orphan she looked after entered her room to bring her porridge and tea. All he could find of her were her robes and the two golden hands. The gods had taken her away and made her one of their own.”

Armie frowned skeptically. “Or she could have changed her clothes, abandoned her hands, and ran away.”

His mother smiled. “Yes, that does sound like a trick someone like her would play. But by all accounts, she was well into her nineties and could only walk with a cane then.”

“Oh. Why are all of those expensive pens and paperweights in front of her?”

“Offerings. They can’t be bought, they must be stolen. She doesn’t care how much it cost in money, only how difficult it was to steal.” Hux focused on the tiny altar and found the answer to a small but nagging schoolroom mystery.

“Colonel Drimti was really mad when his paperweight went missing. His office security was crazy tight. Apparently, the paperweight even came with a certificate that said it was made of a part of the original Death Star. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s ugly.”

The woman calling herself Lysa Bedren winked. “I know.”

“What about the Bloody Mother? What does she do? How do you worship her?”

Lysa sighed sadly. “She protects women and children who are hurt by the people who should have kept them safe. She avenges the weak and the weakened. When her twin sister the Blessed Mother was…hurt by the god of death, she went to war in retaliation. People pray to her for vengeance or protection.” She sounded like a useful goddess. If only there was an actual person with a sword and magical powers to guard them.

“Why don’t you leave her any offerings?”

“You don’t win her favor with promises, flowers, or gifts. In the stories, these helped undo her sister. Instead you worship her by getting revenge, for yourself and others who were hurt.”

“I see.”

Rey felt some unexpected emotions coming from this memory. Confusion. Mild guilt. _Why didn’t you tell me more, Mother?_  
Hux didn’t learn where this pantheon originated from until it was too late, in the same holonet search that gave him the translated lyrics of his lullaby. The song was in a provincial language of Hosnian Prime that died out even before the planet did.

Rey let out a startled gasp. “Your mother was from the Hosnian System? I can’t believe it!”

_For most of my life, I couldn’t either. It’s oddly fitting though. Someone or something out there has a fine sense of humor. I suppose I should feel some self-loathing or regret for what I have done. I waited for those emotions to come. They didn’t. When she talked about leaving her home world, she described it as an escape. There was nothing for her on that planet, to hear her tell it. Nothing but hunger and pain. She didn’t bother to tell me the planet’s name. She said it didn’t matter. In the end, there was nothing for her anywhere. The call from her secret comm proved that._

Before Hux could finish asking his mother about the call, he was trapped in the tightening ring of her arms. There was a faint choking sound coming from her and he briefly considered breaking free and looking for a medkit. Then he realized his mother was crying.

“We’ll survive this, Armie,” she quavered. “We don’t need anyone else.”

“S-survive what? Father? The increased workload this week?” _She’s normally so composed. Whatever is wrong?_

She let him go and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “The New Republic is going to attack next month. Starting with this base and the Academy. We shouldn’t be here for that. But if all goes well, Brendol Hux will.”

“How do you know they’re coming?”

She smiled dangerously. “I gave them the coordinates and the date of a system-wide shielding update. Everything is going to be down for maintenance. The Commandant and all the Generals know it’s a glaring liability, but due to their wise prioritization of funding for psychological conditioning studies and old-fashioned TIES in place of serious weapons and software development, it’s the best they can do.”

“But that’s…that’s _treason,_ Mother!”

“Can’t be treason if I was never actually working for the Order in the first place. You know that.”

“I have friends here. Well, a couple of friends. What about them?”

She sighed. “The Republic is weak-willed and scared of offending anyone. According to all reports, they won’t harm children.”

“What will they do to the Academy?”

“Probably close it down and send everyone who has a home back there.”

“I could get behind that. What about Father?”

“Prison for a very long time if he’s lucky, death by firing squad if he’s not. I’m ashamed to tell you that I am making other people do work I should have finished myself years ago, kiddo, but that’s the truth.”

“I hope he’s not lucky.”

“Me too, Armie. Let’s have some tea. That call just confirmed that we’re not going to get an easy way off this planet. We’ll have to do it ourselves.”

“You didn’t leave together”, Rey stated. “They say Brendol Hux packed everyone he didn’t want to lose onto the _Absolution_ and left.”

_That’s right, we didn’t. Brendol knew my mother better than either of them cared to admit. You’re seeing everything here. You might as well enjoy the show._

When the world ended Armie knelt beside his mother, feeling her wrists for a pulse he didn’t expect to find. She was stiffening. Her hands were so cold they could have been Irmata’s gold-plated prosthetics. Maybe he should have been crying now. Instead he was numb. If this could happen, so could anything else. If there was nothing to stop Brendol’s blaster bolt from reaching his mother’s chest, there was nothing to stop Armie from killing his father and making a living as an interplanetary bank robber. He was vaguely aware that this was not how logic worked, but he didn’t care. There was something he needed to do next. What was it? His fingers brushed the right sleeve of her coat and felt the comforting, barely-there ridge. He worked his little hand into the sleeve, ripping the wrist-sheath from the lining of the coat. She wouldn’t have any more use for that dagger. He inspected it, tracing the unfamiliar insignia on the hilt. A circle with two lines through the middle. Maybe it was a manufacturer’s mark. He’d never gotten a chance to see it up close before; his mother always told him he wasn’t ready to work with wrist-sheaths yet.

“If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll just slit your own wrist by accident. Or send the knife flying hilt-first every time you move your arm.”, she’d said. This was sound advice. But she was gone now. Armie would have to figure out just what he was doing on his own. One thing he learned today was that while a concealed knife was a great comfort in times of danger and useful for many things, it shouldn’t be relied upon when your opponent knew you wanted to kill them and had a blaster. He’d take the knife and sew the sheath into his own coat sleeve. And tell his father about the plans of the New Republic. If he worked hard to make his father trust him, it would make the day he’d watch him die even better. He made a silent prayer to the Bloody Mother for the first time, pocketed the knife, and got up to tell his father about the soldiers who were coming for Arkanis.

“That was…intense”, said Rey. “I’m sorry about what happened to your mother. You loved her so much and you lost her that way. It puts a lot of things in perspective. What sort of chapel did you visit with Rose in Canto Bight?”

The image flickered back before he could stop it. Rey read the sign again. Canto Bight Chapel O’Love.

“Oh. Now I understand. I’d die of shame if I accidentally married someone in a place like that too. Why did we have to go through all of this?” She focused on her own body in the hard plastic chair and left his mind.

Hux glared at her from the hospital bed. “I don’t know. Why did you force your way into my mind?”

“You weren’t cooperating with me! For all I know, you could have hurt Rose.”

Sweat glistened on his face and his hair hung over his forehead in strands. “You said you talked to her with the Force. Did she give you that impression?”

“No. But Rose is the kind of person that will apologize for clumsiness if you step on her foot by accident. I thought she might call herself careless if somebody else took advantage of her.”

Hux laughed. “And yet you belong to an organization that has outlawed torture. How ironic. If I didn’t know about your so-called principles, I’d say you enjoyed doing that.”

“I didn’t! You were so frightened, so lonely…”

“Some people like pain. Experiencing it and inflicting it. Ren says it makes him feel closer to the Dark Side.”

“I don’t!”

Hux shook his head. “We must stop this posturing, Rey. What is your lot going to do with me now? I returned your engineer. Yes, we were accidentally wed while we were both compromised. Before we met Muriel, we were investigating the possibility of an annulment. It was a mistake. But that is not a crime. Unless you have penalties for fraternization with the enemy.”

“Fraternization comes under giving away intelligence. We don’t punish people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now I know what you and Rose did. You can just get divorced, and I can make people forget you were ever married at all.”

“You’re offering to help?”

“Why wouldn’t I? I care about Rose. And if you ever hurt her, I will make everything Kylo has done to you look like playful roughhousing.”

Hux flinched slightly. “Alright, scavenger. Let’s pretend I believe you are making a sincere offer of help. So far the only people who know about our indiscretion are you, Rose, and myself. The doctor, Finn, and Poe are undoubtedly suspicious. All you would have to do for them is plant the idea in their minds that I found Rose blackout drunk and returned her.”

She breathed in heavily. “They would have to know the truth.”

“What? That directly contradicts what you just told me!”

“I trust these people and I don’t have to give them the details. I’m fairly certain that they trust me. Word from me that nothing horrible has happened should be enough. I’d be more comfortable with memory modification if officials accidentally came across records for an instant. Just waving my hand and telling them: ‘You didn’t see that’ has a much lower risk of harm than implanting a new concept or removing suspicions.”

“I see. That is an elegant piece of hypocrisy.”

“How is that hypocritical?”

“You’re willing to probe the minds of your enemies, but you balk at minor adjustments to your friends. I don’t mind that you have those preferences, I only ask that you stop attempting to justify yourself. It doesn’t suit you.”

Rey clenched her fists and prepared a rebuttal. Then she heard a painfully familiar voice: _As much as I hate to admit it, Hux is right. Surrender to the Dark Side, Rey. You would be so strong in it. I can tell it hurts you to hold yourself back. Join me and together we can rule the Galaxy!_ She clutched at her head and doubled over. “GET OUT!” she screamed. “I NEVER ASKED FOR YOUR OPINION ON ANYHING! EVEN IF I DECIDED TO GO TO THE DARK, I DON’T NEED YOU!”

Hux’s jaw dropped. “I never proposed to help you, Rey. Now are we going to talk about this like reasonable people, or are you going to Force-choke me and destroy some consoles? I daresay the Resistance can’t afford repair bills now.”

“Wasn’t talking to you,” Rey muttered. “Kylo Ren.”

“Oh. I’d forgotten about that Force-bond of yours.”

“I nearly did too. He hasn’t though.”

Before Hux could criticize her more or give input on Kylo Ren’s ill-adjusted mental state, the door opened and Rose rushed in, completely naked. He made a small strangled noise in the back of his throat and stared at her in horror.

“What, you’re not happy to see me without beer goggles on?” Rose asked. “It’s nothing new. Yes, I lived.”

Rey followed Hux’s gaze to Rose’s chest. There was a new scar where the heart would be, flesh an angry red. “Turn around,” Rey told her. Rose complied. On her back there was evidence of another wound—no the entry point of something that impaled her.

“Those scars weren’t there last night,” Hux whispered. “I think this is a nightmare now. It has all the usual components. Ridiculously poor judgement on my part, interrogation by a Force-user, and a ghost. Yes, you must be a ghost, Rose. The thing in the Forest that you told me about happened to you, didn’t it?”

Rey was confused. What thing in the forest? Before she could ask what she meant, Kalonia entered the room. “Ah, good. Everyone’s awake and alive. Even though I have no clue what the kriff is happening anymore. General Hux, I have ration bars here that should be safe for you. If on the off-chance they do contain things you can’t eat, I have your epinephrine injector close by. I don’t know what this Galaxy’s coming to. Rose’s chest exploded not half an hour ago but she seems fine now. I can’t say the same for her choice in husbands.”

Rose blushed. “It was an accident. We were drunk.”

Kalonia laughed. “I worked in Accident and Emergency wards before joining the Resistance. I’ve seen evidence of worse mistakes made while drunk.”

“Somehow that’s not very comforting,” Hux drily remarked.

“Can I have clothes?” Rose asked.

Hux peeled off his medbay shirt and tossed it to her. She pulled it on. It fit her like a short dress.

“Thanks.”

“I didn’t want to look at that anymore.”

“You’re no legendary beauty yourself, Hux.”

“I meant that scar not your tits,” Hux replied. “But as this situation is exceedingly uncomfortable for both us not to mention inappropriate, I suppose it’s better this way.”

Rey looked at them. “Will you tell me what’s going on, please? Did Muriel give you that wound?”

Rose touched her chest and winced. “She did. She healed me afterwards. She broke me and put me back together again. I hope she understands what she did. We had a long talk about it. She’s just a child.”

“So you keep saying,” Hux muttered. The ship’s comm crackled.

“General Hux, sir?” An unfamiliar voice stammered out.

“Lieutenant Mitaka,” Hux explained.

“I had a bit of a conversation with Commander Dameron before I could get patched through, sir. General Organa had a word with him at the end, it seems. You aren’t picking up your personal comm or your datapad, sir. I activated the tracker function on your datapad, and I located you, I hope. Please pick up. We need to talk. Supreme Leader Ren has learned how to…view personnel files, it seems, and yours was automatically updated with a timestamp of eleven-thirty Cantonica Standard Time last night. He wants to talk with you regarding ‘event planning and future living arrangements’, sir. If you don’t respond within the next hour, this silence will be interpreted as the Resistance holding you captive or otherwise harming you and we will attack as this is a clear violation of the new treaty.” The call ended.

Hux turned paler than Rey thought humanly possible. “This is a real nightmare now,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’m ready for what’s next. Do you hear me, subconscious? I’m ready for the worst! Is my father going to show up now? Will Mother make a speech about how she expected better from me? Or will the floor drop away into a pit of ravenous porgs that will eat me alive? Electrocution to death by BB units? I’m waiting!”

Rey turned to Kalonia and Rose. Rose smirked. "You're scared of BB units?"

“You have nightmares about getting eaten by porgs?” Rey asked, incredulous.

“Those eyes are like bottomless black pits. They could be capable of anything,” he replied. “You’re all real? This isn’t a dream?” They nodded.

“I just said all of that. Kriff.” He turned to Kalonia. “May I have my personal commlink back, please?”

She handed it to him. “General Organa is coming soon to see you,” Kalonia stated.

“Just when I thought the day could get no worse,” Hux moaned.

Rose glared at him. “Leia is one of the best people I know,” she said. “She’s a leader, she’s kind, and she may have some ideas on what to do.”

“She produced Kylo Ren. I wouldn’t let myself grow comfortable with her.” He turned on his commlink. “Lieutenant Mitaka? Thank you so much. Are you safe enough for now? Good.” He sighed. “Supreme Leader Ren? Yes, I got drunkenly married in Canto Bight last night. Considering that I haven’t had planetside leave in seven years, I think I rather earned it.”


	22. Event Planning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> References to child abuse (non-physical), possible torture, and brainwashing.  
> This is the crackiest thing I've written so far. Enjoy. I am going to put this on hiatus for the next couple of months for school and the internship search, but I wanted to bring everyone together before I did that. (Why I can crank out all of this yet struggle to write 300-word personal statements is beyond me.)  
> Thank you to everyone who's still reading this madness. I love hearing what people think!

Finn laughed when Kalonia fetched them from the canteen in a huff, peeved because Rose ran away from medbay. “If you couldn’t catch her, then I guess it’s nothing serious.”

“You don’t understand! Her kriffing chest exploded! I thought I saw Force lightning stitching her back together again.” They moved at a speed just below jogging with BB-8 rolling ahead of them.

Finn and Poe’s faces fell. BB-8 trilled in surprise. “That can’t be good,” Poe said. “But she’s up. Running away from your tender care. Talking back to Hux. At least it means she’s back to her usual self.”

“That’s what worries me. We know so little about the effects of mind-control through the Force and the medical community has not even managed to decide whether possession is possible or not.”

Poe shuddered. “Kylo Ren couldn’t have done anything to her last night. He had to be in the same room as me to…” he trailed off.

Kalonia put a hand on his shoulder. “Well, that’s one possibility ruled out. But to hear Luke and Leia tell it, Snoke was always stronger than Kylo Ren in the Force. According to Rey, the death of Snoke was a fluke; apparently, he was shocked and emotionally compromised at the time. I wonder what Snoke actually was, and if there are any more beings like him out in the Galaxy somewhere, interfering from a distance.”

They all sobered at that. The door to Hux’s room slid open, and a wave of noise burst out. Hux was snarling at somebody over his personal commlink; Rey was frantically whispering to an alarmed Leia.

“Leave her out of this, Ren!” Hux barked. “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, as was I. If intelligence of this…blunder has not spread beyond First Order private servers, it should be but a simple matter of wiping that part of my personal record and letting the rumors die out of their own accord.” He paused, and Finn watched that vein on his temple twitch against his pallid skin. It was like seeing an old friendly acquaintance again. Though in all his time as a First Order stormtrooper, he’d rarely seen Hux in such a state. “No, I do not think an ‘official ceremony in a public venue as a symbol of new cooperation between the Resistance and the First Order’ is at all appropriate.” Rose glanced at Hux. _Let me talk to him,_ she mouthed. Hux shook his head. “No, and that’s final, Supreme Leader. I know you love nothing more than my own humiliation, but dragging someone else into your twisted mind-games is a bridge too far.”

Quick as a striking snake, Rose grabbed Hux’s wrist and wrestled the commlink out of his hand. She dashed over to stand by Leia. “Supreme Leader Kylie Ron? Oh, is it Kylo Ren? Dear me, I’m such a silly girl. Never can remember names.” Uncharacteristically, she giggled. _Now I know why Kalonia is worried about possession,_ Finn thought. Hux’s face turned scarlet.

“Yes, this is Rose Tico. Mechanical Engineer First Class, serving with the Resistance. Officially we’re allied with the New Republic, I think, but politics are much too complicated for the likes of me to understand. I just want all my friends to be safe and my husband to be happy. I married General Hux last night. He’s a precious dear.” Poe stared at the tableau, horrified. Finn shook his head. _Possessed,_ he whispered.

“So, what were you saying to my dreamy little ginger honey-porg?” Hux actually gagged at this. “He sounded very upset. I don’t like it when he’s sad.” She pouted. These lines had even Leia riveted to the scene, open-mouthed.

“You’re sad we didn’t invite you to the wedding? Oh, Kylie, sorry, Kylo, this doesn’t mean you’re not his friend anymore. We were so excited to get married and neither of us likes a fuss. None of my friends were invited either. A private chapel was ever so romantic. Just me, my husband, and the priestess joining us in the eyes of the Force.” Hux opened his mouth to scream at her, but Rose shook her head. _I know what I’m doing,_ she hissed.

“I’m sure you don’t!” Hux was incandescent with rage.

“Oh that? My sweet lovely husband is worried that you’ll hurt me. He’s so protective. It’s endearing, but I am a big girl. I can take care of myself. And him. He was in an awful way last night; you never let him get any sleep!”

Harter Kalonia pulled a syringe out of her medkit and filled it with what Finn strongly suspected was a sedative. Rose saw this and shook her head.

“No, we haven’t thought about where we’ll live as a couple. I was a bit tired after our,” _giggle,_ “fun together last night, so we decided to stop by the Resistance for a while. It’s house hunting. But I think the First Order might be best for the two of us. I mean to support him and his career, and if I can still have my friends over for caf on a regular basis I think I will be happy in a new place. As long as he’s there.” It felt wrong to hear Rose giggle.

“Yes, I will need to discuss this with my husband. And General Organa, of course. But I’m sure we can get everybody to talk and work something out. When we do, we’ll comm you back. Alright, Ron? Sorry, Ren. It was great to talk with you! I so look forward to meeting you in person!” She cut the call and put the commlink down on a table.

“Okay, everyone, I have something resembling a plan.” Her voice dropped an octave and was back at its normal pitch. “Unknown to me, I’ve had a Force-using sentient being living in my mind ever since I was thirteen years or so. I suppose that having a higher than average amount of adolescent angst and losing family members can open a person to the Dark Side. She goes by Muriel and is Snoke’s younger sister. If I had to guess, she is the equivalent of about nine or ten human years old. Due to our recent strengthening of a pre-existing Force-bond, she is able to pass some of her abilities on to me.”

Leia turned chalk-white. “I don’t think she really wants to conquer the Galaxy, she just wants revenge for her dead brother.” Rose paused and moved her lips silently. “You’re at that age when you think you want certain things that will bore you later,” she admonished some unseen being. “If you don’t like paperwork and listening to people, you won’t like ruling an empire. Trust me.” She sighed. “Sorry about that. Apparently, I can also drain Force-users of their powers. So that sets me up well to kill Kylo Ren. I’m not used to murdering people, so the ideal scenario involves Hux stabbing him while I distract and restrain him. Failing that, Muriel will transfer her abilities to me, which include Force-manipulation, Force-choking, and mind-probing. I will do my best.” She set her mouth in a grim line. “Any questions?”

“Yes!” Finn burst out. “Why did you marry General Hux? Did you actually do it, or was that just a ruse for Kylo? It won’t work because he can READ MINDS!”

Rose grimaced. “Once, I had a younger cousin. Her name was Nia. One day at a family party when I was twelve and she was five, she took it into her head that I should marry another cousin of mine, Alin. He was fifteen. It didn’t work to tell her that cousins didn’t marry each other, that he already had a girlfriend who wasn’t related to us at all, that we approved of his girlfriend. She wanted to see us get married, so she chased us around the whole house and garden screaming: ‘Hold hands! That means you’re married!’ Eventually we holed up in his room and played holo-vid games for the rest of the night just to escape her. Muriel had a similar mindset to Nia. Only she is good at hacking systems and controlling people’s minds through the Force. Snoke taught her well. Let’s just say we did rather more than play holo-vid games last night. According to the official records, we’re married. At least there’s next to no chance that the two of us are related. I thank the Force for small miracles.”

The roomful of people stared at them in horror.

“What did you tell Kylo?” Hux asked. “Why did you do that-that _voice?_ He’s not going to forgive you for calling him Kylie, you know.”

“At my age I can’t play a harmless old lady,” she replied. “I had to settle for being an oblivious young scatterbrain. The only kind of woman I imagine would willingly marry you, knowing what you are.”

“Thank you for that shining compliment, Tico.”

“You’re welcome. I did train under my Auntie Carissa for a while. She taught me to fake stupidity. Though in that case, I do think I overdid it out of nerves.”

“Carissa? Would that by any chance be Carissa Yanin?”

Rose gave him a wary glance. “Am I going to like the answer I get if I say yes? After all these years, I’ve managed to not think about it anymore. The people who disappeared never went anywhere good.”

“I wouldn’t know. We never managed to find Yanin. Not for want of trying. At the end of the day, we could never separate rumor from fact where she was concerned. She was alive. Someone killed her. She killed herself. She’s running a prize shaak farm on Naboo. She was Jackhammer Vi’s lover. She was sleeping with Brendol Hux-I know that much wasn’t true. She had no passion but the Resistance, others said.”

Rose smirked triumphantly. “Wait, ‘Jackhammer Vi’?”

“The older officers told horror stories about her. She did things with pliers and a pair of knitting needles. And a rusty old jackhammer. People disappeared around her. To walk down Cromir street was to seal one’s death sentence. One officer managed to have a secret commlink on during his interrogation, according to the tale. The last they heard of him before the transmission cut was: ‘Please, Auntie, please! I’ll tell you anything! Just make it stop! NO MORE TEA!!!’ The person telling the story would usually pause after that, and then tell everyone it was time for bed.”

Rose was laughing now. “I can only verify the relationship between Auntie Carissa and Auntie Vi. And the fact that she did have a jackhammer.”

“ _Auntie._ ”  
“Yes, Vi Tico was my great-aunt. She raised me.”

Hux took a step back and hit the wall.

“I don’t think she tortured people with the implements or methods you described though. If she did, she hid it well. And to think that they say the First Order has no imagination!” She shook her head. “I think you should all meet Muriel. She is quite different from Snoke in many ways.” After a brief internal conversation, the air seemed to ripple, and Rose held the hand of a milk-pale little creature who only came up to Rose’s hip. It was wearing golden robes and pointy slippers, and around its neck a gold disk hung on a chain. The pendant was inscribed with a circle bisected by two parallel lines. The being gaped at them and ducked behind Rose, but Finn could see the flash of metal.

“Hey! That necklace has the exact same insignia as the one on the hilt of Hux’s dagger!”

Poe glanced over, craning his neck to see behind Rose. “I see it too. General Hugs, where did you get that knife of yours?”

It was a testament to the power of the harrowing series of previous events that Hux only flushed slightly when his name was mangled. “My mother passed it on to me.”

“But where did she get it?” Finn knew that they ought to focus on talking to little Muriel, but such a link seemed important.

“I don’t know,” Hux replied, “and if you don’t mind, I would rather refrain from discussing my mother.”

Muriel spoke up, creeping out from Rose’s nominal shelter and tightening her grasp on the woman’s hand. “General Hux’s mother was one of our officers. My brother started calling them Knights of Ren instead. He said it was more accurate since they could use the Force and it sounded cooler anyway. Everyone else laughed at him, but it wasn’t funny. When Ben Solo became Kylo, he took Ren as his new last name because he was everything they couldn’t be.”

Finn could see something snap in Leia. In an instant, she went from kindly maternal Leia to a raging _General_ . Who was also a wounded mother and therefore even more dangerous.“Are you telling me that there are more…things like you out in the Unknown Regions, and you project yourselves into Force-Sensitives and potential Jedi? Do you turn them to the Dark and make them strangers to their parents?”

“The programs have met with mixed results.” Muriel gazed up at General Organa with her oversized blue eyes. “Making them strangers to their parents isn’t so bad though. I wouldn’t mind if somebody took me away from my Mama and Papa.” Leia stared at her with a mix of fear, sorrow, and pity. “This place is too loud. I’m leaving, Rosie.” She let go of Rose’s hand and vanished.

“I didn’t think she’d be so small,” Hux muttered. “Snoke’s height was real and not a trick of the hologram. But she’s not mature by our standards or theirs.”

Leia was crying. She tried valiantly not to show it, but the tears flowed on. “When Muriel and I…strengthened our bond,” Rose said, timidly breaking the painful silence, “I could see Muriel’s surroundings. And then I understood. She has spent her whole life confined to a room. Her people live on a planet hostile to life, and they are extremely telepathic. Deprivation of sensory input like weather, touch, and face-to-face conversations is said to enhance Force abilities in their kind, and all children enter an isolation period. Muriel took to it worse than most do. Snoke visited her in secret when he could, but it wasn’t enough. She wanted to do the things she was never allowed to, so she reached out with the Force. And found me. Most of the time she didn’t intervene, she was just along for the ride. In the beginning, all she wanted was to experience things with someone else.”

Sweat rolled down Finn’s neck. _I can’t believe an entire species raises their children with the worst parts of Reconditioning._ For years on end. It wasn’t the torrents of propaganda that made Reconditioning a feared punishment among the Stormtroopers. It was the blank hours that left you begging for something, anything the First Order would offer you, anything to keep you from the silence and the void… He slipped his hand into Poe’s, and his boyfriend held it without question.

Hux cleared his throat. “Sorry to interrupt and change the subject abruptly, but when Ren commed me he offered me a choice; defect to the Resistance or return to the First Order with Rose for a…” he paused, reluctant to voice this option, “large, public, ‘proper’ wedding. With an exchange of vows and a cake, allegedly. Rose’s machinations may or may not have furthered this cause. I think he only wants to do it so he can read my mind during the event for his own amusement.”

Rose deflated. “It will likely come to that. If I don’t follow Muriel’s directions for Kylo’s assassination, things could get unpleasant. Should we have to do that, I’d like Poe to be the Best Man, Rey to serve as my Bridesmaid, and Finn to give me away. Wedding dress can be dress uniform. I’ve always liked the ombré frosting trend in wedding cakes and would prefer that in orange fading to white.”

Another stunned silence. “That was supposed to be a joke. I don’t want to involve any more people than we must or put anyone at risk. But I don’t see a way out of me leaving for the First Order.” She teared up. Hux reached into his trouser pockets and pulled out a rumpled handkerchief. She took it without a word.

“Things could be worse,” he said. “It’s nice to know about an undercover agent for once. And I hope our arrangement in private will be nothing more than professional.” Rose blew her nose wetly and Hux flinched.

“You’re right,” Rose said. “Things could be worse. I’ll likely have to put on a show and kiss a First Order officer, but at least I found one under forty.” She laughed bitterly.

“BB-8 could give you the rings,” said Poe in a desperate attempt to lighten the mood. BB-8 beeped angrily. “No, buddy, it’s not because you’re ‘cute’. I wouldn’t make you throw flower petals or wear a bow.” More unhappy trills. Finn wished he knew binary. He’d tried to pick it up, but BB-8 had its own little dialect that only Poe completely understood.

“You could be part of the honor guard for Rose. After all, you do have a built-in taser and shock probe. And you got some new weapons upgrades when I wasn’t looking. Honor guard works. You’re shiny and you can protect her at the altar.” The beeps sounded slightly more appeased.

“I would love to have BB-8 in my honor guard, if I get one,” Rose said. “Thanks, you two. And Finn, that was a good catch with the insignia. I have to go see Dr. Kalonia about some scans and a pill.” Kalonia and Rey hustled her back to the other medbay room. Meanwhile, Leia set up her datapad and was frantically calling various politicians while typing.

Poe patted BB-8 on the head and Finn was gratified to hear Hux gasp:

“You trust that vicious little thing?”

Poe shook his head. “Hugs, you’ve married into the Resistance. You’re family now. You need to respect everyone in your family and communicate with them. Now tell BB-8 you’re sorry.”

Hux grimaced and crouched down. “Alright, BB-8. I apologize for offending your human’s sensibilities.” BB-8 whirred and flicked its lighter.

“It’s giving you the thumbs-up! You guys are going to get along, if you only put in a little work.”

Finn privately thought that signal was the droid equivalent of a middle finger but kept his thoughts to himself.


	23. Interlude: Always Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After this, I'll probably be on hiatus from now until Aug. 15. Thank you for your patience with this slow moving & slow to update story.

The sun has long since set on Cantonica’s alternately filthy or filthy rich streets. As the city awakes to a dream of gambling and glamour, so do the workers. Three uniformed children make their way over to the fathier stables for the start of their shift, a frizzy-haired brunette flanked by two boys, one fair-skinned and the other dark. The oldest is perhaps thirteen.

“Let’s get fried wrack-fruits after our shift,” the girl says. “I’ll buy.”

“Are you sure, Mata?”, the dark-skinned boy asks, “I know credits are tight.”

The girl laughs. “Got no more family members left to send money home to. Can’t worry about Mam, Granny and the rest paying the rent if there’s no longer a tenement building or planet to rent. That means there’s more for me. Yes, Father, I can afford it.”

“Don’t call me Father,” the boy grumbles. “You’re only six months younger than me.”

“Mata may be on to something,” the other boy remarks. “Ashbel here is the only responsible adult out of the three of us. If it weren’t for him, we’d be unemployed, or dead in an alley, or both.”

Ashbel kicks at an empty metal beverage container, letting the cylinder clatter off into the shadows “I’m enabling you lot. I should stop.” He stalks off towards a side street, but it’s clear that he has performed this act many times before.

The other boy gasps in mock horror. “Oh, Mata! Whatever shall we do? Our wise old grandfather is leaving us! Without his guidance, we shall starve and fall into sin!”

The girl slowly staggers into his arms. “I don’t know, Fanal. Perhaps we shall sell matches by the racetrack and beg. Oh, woe! Such painful…pain we will feel at his loss.” She sniffles theatrically.

“Don’t block the sidewalk, get a room!”, a passing croupier on his way to work hollers at them.

“Kark off! We’re children!”, the girl screams back. Ashbel rejoins them.

“That doesn’t matter in this town,” he says sadly. They all know. That’s why Mata sticks close to Ashbel and Fanal. She has a dagger up her shirt sleeve in the fashion of all respectable criminals on Hosnian Prime, but she worries that one day it won’t be enough. Even though she’s a capable judge of risk and character. There have been times when she felt a prickling sense of fear, obeyed it, and gone home safe. Ashbel looks after her with his extra inches of height and growing muscles. They both watch skinny little Fanal, and worry. It’s not that Fanal is irresponsible, naïve, or stupid, it’s just that his small stature and frame could mark him as easy prey. They are children. They have adults who should look after them. But it doesn’t matter in greedy, expensive, profiteering Cantonica. They work to survive and defend their own. Fanal and Ashbel have edges, too.

Not just the ones that come from growing up in a city of casinos and drunk or dead fathers. Ashbel has a way with the fathiers, soothing an agitated racer with only a word and a touch of his hand. People always want to protect Fanal, for some reason.

The three children pick their way through the alleyways, through dirty back paths that generations of tourists looking for the “real” Cantonica experience paradoxically never tread. Because they would be dead within an hour, stripped of their fine things. Mata is on edge tonight. The fiery death of her family (she hardly remembers them) means more money for her to lavish on food, extra credits to hide from her Uncle in the hopes of one day buying a ticket out of here and enlisting in whichever militia will give her pilot training. She used to dream about running away to join the Resistance. Then, a couple of desperate Resistance fighters let all the fathiers out a couple of months ago.

Didn’t they know that this was a desert planet? There was nowhere near enough vegetation on the plains to sustain a herd of that size. It was all scrubby grass over a thin layer of sand. The non-native herbivores would over-graze, then starve. And it took Mata and her friends a week to round them all up. However, the exercise and change of fare was good for the herd. Consequentially, she wasn’t too keen on the Resistance anymore. She might join them, but only if she couldn’t find anyone else to give her pilot training. Even though the Resistance woman with the ponytail gave Fanal a ring. To be fair, it wasn’t likely the First Order understood ecology or proper animal care either. But she wouldn’t join them out of spite; the First Order destroyed her so-called homeworld. It didn’t mean much to her, but ever since that broadcast her Uncle was broken. He didn’t go to his bar tending job anymore. He drank instead. Mata didn’t tell her friends of this. It wouldn’t be right to burden them.

“Are you gonna finish the story you started telling us last night?” Fanal asks, looking up at Ashbel. The older boy’s stories were good. Most of them were about the old Jedi knights, intricate tales of friendships, quests, and the Force. When Mata closed her eyes while listening to them, she could imagine that the three of them were heroic Jedi on missions to save the Galaxy. Some of the tales may have roots in the truth; Ashbel’s mother can heal people, and his grandparents were refugees from Haruun Kal.

“I don’t know what’s happening next,” he admits. “I’ll tell you when I’ve got it worked out.”

“Aww, I wanted to hear what happens to Ulsi the rogue,” Mata whines. “You left her tied to the wicked Duke’s speeder!”

Ashbel raises his eyebrows. “I never said the Duke was evil.”

“Come on. Of course he’s evil. He captures Ulsi! He never explains his plans to anybody! He has a beard!”

“Those traits don’t automatically make a villain,” Fanal says. “Ulsi’s not a saint, either.”

They pass into a section of dimly-lit streets, and instinctively press closer together. The quiet is oppressive. Fanal starts talking again. “There are always three people in your stories, Ashbel. And there’s three of us.”

“A coincidence,” Ashbel replies. “It’s hard to focus on more than three main characters at once.”

“But they, like, each have defined roles. Arch-tips?”

“Archetypes. Some of us read.”

“You read,” Mata shrugs.

“Yeah, but there’s a formula to the characters and their place in the story,” Fanal presses on. “The princess. The knight. The rogue, or the common soldier. If we lived in a story, who would each of us be?”

“I’m not the princess!”

“Yeah, you’d be the traveling soldier type, Mata. But there has to be one, and it’s not me, either. I think it would be Ashbel.”

“Hey!”

“I meant in terms of temperament and role. It should be possible to be a man and a princess, too. You’re smart. You’re nice to people. You probably have some destiny the rest of us don’t know about.”

Ashbel stops walking, and the others slow their pace around him. “Why have we stopped?” Mata looks into the mouth of an alley apprehensively, sliding the knife out of her sleeve. There is a bearded old man, slumped against a wall, a set of military dog tags hanging around his neck. His hands are clutching at his temples, and his face is contorted into a grimace of pain. He looks pathetic rather than dangerous, but there’s something about the way he twitches that makes her uneasy.

“He doesn’t look well,” Ashbel murmurs. He digs through his bag and pulls out a plastic-wrapped square. “I packed an extra sandwich.”

“Not sure if he’ll be in any condition to eat,” Fanal says, shaking his head.

The old man whimpers and opens his eyes wide in terror. “You call this fixing,” he tells some unseen being, “and maybe it is, but it doesn’t change what you did to me. And them.” He listens to half of an imaginary conversation for a moment, then points one shaking finger at the air.

“And her!”, he admonishes his unseen companion. “She’s the last of my kind, alone, untrained, and in danger! You didn’t think, did you?” He sighs and slides further down the wall, his anger passing quickly into resignation.

Fanal and Mata back away. Some people are beyond saving. But Ashbel places the wrapped sandwich beside the old man. The beggar’s eyes track the motion. He blinks a few times, then picks it up. “Thank you, boy.”

“You’re welcome,” Ashbel says, softly. He doesn’t say: “Is there anyone we can call for you?” If there were, this man wouldn’t be here, tonight. The beggar unwraps the sandwich and takes a few bites.

“You make a good sandwich, Ashbel.” Now even Ashbel is unnerved, shifting backwards.

“How do you know my name?”

“You think loudly. The Force knows you well and is with you. It will carry you far, someday.”

“Let’s go! We’ll be late to work!” Mata grabs Ashbel’s elbow and starts dragging him away.

“It’s good that you’re looking after him, Irmata,” the old man says. The girl freezes. She never uses the full form of her name. It is the hideous, archaic name of some goddess of thieves or something. Who got her hands chopped off, despite being a goddess and all. Her Mam showed her a picture, once.

“You have potential as well. You’ll never be as strong as a Jedi, but there is freedom in obscurity. You remind me of somebody I used to know, long ago.”

Fanal creeps back to Mata’s side, eyes wide in fear. This man is different from the average street crazy.

“And you have it too, Fanal. Don’t forget it.”

The old man drops the sandwich. It falls a few inches, then some unseen force catches it and raises it to his lips once more. He takes another bite of chunky Vash-nut butter and zeki-fruit spread.

“If the three of you can get me to the Resistance delegation before they take off, I’ll teach you how to do this.”

Mata looks at her friends. Fanal shrugs. Ashbel nods. "I think it's worth the risk of unemployment", he says.

"Do you think he might be tricking us?" Mata asks. "I mean, I've never felt the Force before, he could be lying..."

"He's not lying," Ashbel reassures her. "I just know. We need to all have a talk about your uncle, too, but that can happen later."

Though Mata doubts her own abilities, this is irrevocable proof that Ashbel Windu is at least a Force-sensitive. Ashbel helps the old man up , and they head out into the night. They're going to brazenly march into the Diplomacy sector on a mad old man's whim, but it could get the three of them one step closer to their dreams.


	24. Tactical Kissing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only over fifty thousand words to get to one kiss! This isn't a slow burn, this is boiling water for tea on a lukewarm stove.

Hux sat beside Rose Tico at the long conference table in the _Finalizer_ willing himself to not run away screaming. Here, in this meeting room, he was not in control for once. Captain Canady sat across from them, silently pleading for death. Lieutenant Mitaka hovered like an anxious ghost behind them, standing at attention and tapping at his datapad from time to time.

“He’s late,” Canady said.

Hux scoffed. “And sand is coarse, rough, and irritating” he replied.

“I like sand,” Rose muttered. “It’s nice to walk on in bare feet.”

“Don’t let Ren hear you say that,” Hux chided.

One second later, the conference room door slid open, and Ren sulked in, trailing stupid black robes. At least he’d stopped wearing the mask.

“I’m sure you know why I’ve called you all here today,” Ren said. “Somehow, General Hux managed to secure the affections of a random Resistance tech, and they’re getting married to make some sort of diplomatic alliance. Never mind that such a pairing between two rival Force-users would make more sense.”

“We are already married,” Hux stated. “Another ceremony would serve no purpose.”

“I thought you liked spectacles,” Ren said. “Snoke forced me to go to all your motivational speeches. Never mind that you had far too many.” He brushed his messy dark hair out of his face and leaned over Hux. The redhead flinched. “I’m doing you a favor by assisting with your wedding planning, you know. Most people hire someone for this.”

Rose spoke: “My Armie is shy, Reg. And I liked the intimacy of a private wedding.”

Ren glared at her. “Ren. It’s _Ren_ , and don’t you forget it…Lily?”

“Rose.”

“Yeah, Rose.”

Rose Tico scowled back at the Supreme Leader. Ren tried to hold the stare, then blinked twice and looked away. Rose was good at giving dirty looks. Hux could appreciate that in a woman. “Right. Your marriage on Cantonica was valid in all systems, but that guarantee does _not_ extend to the First Order. I looked it up. The thing about us is that we are a military organization technically not a part of any Galactic government. So, the laws of the local planets don’t apply to First Order members. If you want your union to be valid, you need a ceremony here. Officiated by a qualified First Order officer.”

Hux froze. _They didn’t need an annulment after all. But now it was too late for that_. Rose lowered her eyebrows and bit her lip. A few giggles forced their way out of her mouth, despite her best efforts.

Canady looked at her with concern. “Are you alright, miss…no, Mrs. Hux?”

Rose grinned painfully. “You can call me Rose. I’m fine. This is fantastic! I get two weddings. I am such a lucky girl. And my Armie always puts himself down. I can’t wait to show everyone how much I love him, and he deserves nice things now and then.”

Hux kicked her shin under the table. She was laying it on a bit thick. Then again, Ren was emotionally immature enough to interpret a rejection, complete with near-death experiences, as a temporary setback on the road to love. Kylo had written poems about Rey slashing him up with a lightsaber. He’d had to read them and say that they were good.

“Supreme Leader, I fail to understand why my presence is necessary,” Canady stated. “Of course, I would like to congratulate the,” and here he paused and looked from Rose to Hux and back again, “…happy couple, but I am but a Captain of the First Order.”  
“Ah. Captain Canady, you are an ordained Chaplin of the Church of the Sacrificed, are you not?” Ren smiled. “And as such, you perform weddings.”

Canady gritted his teeth. “With respect, Supreme Leader, my function is to provide spiritual counselling to those among the First Order who follow my faith. I can officiate weddings, but only for those within my community of belief. Considering that the Church of the Sacrificed does not have much of a following outside my homeworld of Bogrin, I doubt that General Hux or his fiancée would find meaning in the ceremony I perform. Besides, sir, I heard that you received training as a spiritual leader before…” He gulped and fell forward as Kylo clenched his fist. When Canady’s face turned red, Kylo released his grip.

“Y-yes, Supreme Leader, I will officiate,” Canady wheezed.

“Good,” said Ren.

Hux rested his face in the palm of his gloved hand for a second, before breathing in deeply. “I suppose we should move on and discuss the catering arrangements.”

Rose pulled up her datapad and clicked to a holosite. “This place seems reasonably priced and has good reviews.”

Hux looked over her shoulder. He agreed. “We can probably just get a bunch of sandwiches. That shouldn’t be too expensive or messy.”

“And a cake. If I have to stand up and repeat vows with you, at the very least we can eat a cake at the end of it.”

“Fine. Oh, they have package deals. Let’s see, how many people will actually attend this thing…”

Kylo Ren stood up and left the room.

“Typical,” Hux sighed. “He tells me what to do but makes me figure out how to do it.” He tapped out a memo to Ren on his datapad: _Estimated guest attendance for this farce? I need to know for planning purposes. –General A. Hux._ He sent it. “We should think about what we’ll wear for this. I can wear my dress uniform.”

“I have one too,” Rose offered. “I can get it sent over.”

“Is it orange?”

“No. Olive-drab. Now that I think about it, I think I did get a stain on it from the time that there was an emergency systems failure during a diplomatic summit…”

Hux frowned. “I’m not sure that attending your wedding in full Resistance regalia would send the right message. You’re roughly the same height and size as Chief Petty Officer Unamo. She has a wedding dress that she doesn’t need anymore. I should ask her to let you borrow it.” He rubbed at his temples. “Kriff. I wish we didn’t have to go through all of this.”

“You lead battles, Hux. Planning a wedding should be easier.” Rose forced a smile.

Canady shook his head. “I’d rather fight homicidal fuzzballs on some gods-forsaken forest planet than work out logistics for a wedding. My niece Darlene made three wedding planners quit in tears. They changed the wedding venue five times. And of course, she got divorced from her husband a year later. I told Darlene that I didn’t like her boyfriend the day I met him. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. She might have gotten engaged out of spite.”

“Mhm,” Rose said. “Or maybe for the attention that comes with a big wedding.”

“Yes, exactly,” Canady replied. “I’ve always told her parents that they should pay more attention to her, it wasn’t the girl’s fault that she had three older sisters who all graduated Academy with honors before she was even ready to go. Whatever she did, her siblings did it first and better. That had to take a toll on her.”

“I know,” Rose said. “I used to be jealous of my older sister all the time.”

Canady smiled sympathetically. “At least you recognized it in yourself and moved on. It takes some maturity to do that.”

“Also, she died,” Rose told him.

“Oh. I am sorry for your loss.”

“I’m not sure you would be, but thank you.”

Canady bit his lip and grimaced when he remembered Rose’s place of employment and worked out what this sentence meant. Before their conversation could get any worse, Hux coughed. “Captain, I have shared a document with you. Lieutenant Mitaka, as my adjutant you will assist with this matter as well.”

“Can I have a copy too?”

“ I’ll share it.” He hit the “add collaborators” button on the interface. “Did you get it?”

“No.”

“Hmm. We’ll try again…”

“My datapad is not connected to your holonet signal,” Rose told him. “I’m running off my own data right now. I tried to connect earlier, but it asked for the password, my First Order serial number, and a retinal scan.”

“Oh. We can get you set up later. Just don’t get any ideas about becoming a slicer and leaking everything to the Resistance.”

“I won’t.”

Canady looked up from his datapad. “General, Rose, is it possible for me to have a brief meeting in private with each of you? Before we get too busy with planning this? I could start with Rose, since you’re working on getting her into the system. Afterwards, I would like to meet with both of you at once.”

“That is acceptable. Might I ask why?” Hux was suspicious. Would Canady try to enlist Rose into a mutiny?

“Counselling. I’ve found it helps if I know what each person wants out of the relationship, and then we can all talk about the potential challenges you face as a couple. Church regulations, sir. I have to do this with everyone I marry. Sometimes, people go to a relationship counselor and find out that they don’t want to get married, after all. It saves a lot of time and effort. Ideally, you would see an independent couples therapist, but since time is of the essence, this is the best we can do.”

Hux nodded. “Rose, are you alright with doing this now?”

“Yes. Where should we go?”

“Just stepping out of this meeting room and walking around the hall a bit should do.”

Canady and Rose left. Hux started drafting a schedule. If they could hold the ceremony at a time when everyone was working and unable to take leave, then the guest list would be quite manageable.

“I didn’t think Ren would do this to you, sir.” Mitaka shook his head. “I also find it unlikely that…” he trailed off.

“What do you find unlikely, Mitaka?”

“Wasn’t Rose working with FN-2187? Didn’t she bite you when you captured her?”

Hux silently counted to ten while thinking of an appropriate response. “Yes, she did, Lieutenant. And your point is?”

“Why are you together? Are you…is she…”

“Rose Tico is smart, good with technical issues, and nice to look at. I heard she designed the cloaking systems for the Resistance escape pods. The ones that fried three consoles when we tried to crack them.” That fact was probably true, according to rumor and a couple of informants.

“So you’re seducing her for information, sir?”

“No, but if that was one of her former projects, I’d be interested to see what she’ll do in the future.”

Mitaka snorted. “But you got sloshed and got married to do this?”

“Unfortunately, that is the case.”

Mitaka rolled his eyes. “This is just like the Rodian Splice Incident. That was part of one of your grand plans back then, wasn’t it?”

“Speak for yourself. I’m not the one who was found buried under six buckets of Tatooine Dweezels dressed in the style of Queen Amidala. I don’t even know how you managed to do that.”

Mitaka paled at the memory of an awkward night and more awkward questions. “The fruits were on sale. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“I meant the robes and make-up.”

“Oh. Sensor Officer Driuna was doing everybody’s make-up that night, I think. But Hux, this is different than what we got up to back then. It involves another person. It could compromise your own safety. If she stopped at nothing to fight you last time—”

“We have reached an understanding now.”

At that, the door slid open and Rose returned with Canady.

“Hey, Rose,” Mitaka said, “I know that this is a tactless question, but are you planning to stab Hux once you get him in bed, or poison his tea?”

“Why would she say yes?” Hux asked. Hux had gotten to the top of his Academy class by eliminating all competitors quite literally. Mitaka had received that distinction by academic merit alone.

“What would you do if I said yes?” Rose laughed.

“I mean, you bit him.”

Rose grinned evilly. “He’s kind of into that.”

Canady blushed as red as Starkiller Base destroying the Hosnian System. Mitaka cringed. And Hux got out of his seat and glared at Rose. “No. Don’t.”

Rose giggled, threw her arms around him, and got up on her tiptoes to give him a peck on the lips.

“We have to make this believable,” she whispered in his ear. "Let's pretend we like each other."

He acquiesced to her point by kissing her again, harder and deeper. Rose broke the seal of the kiss and slid down to nibble on his lower lip. He stopped this by shoving his tongue in her mouth. His nose grazed her cheek until they worked out a better angle. Rose’s mouth tasted like minty toothpaste mixed with ration bars and stale caf. It was a revolting combination, but they had to keep up appearances. Her hair brushed against his cheek like the wings of some passing nectar-drinking insect, gracing his presence only for a fleeting moment. She was warm and soft against him. He did not like this at all.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Canady and Mitaka leave. But they didn’t stop.


End file.
